dmarshall83

I guess I should start off by saying that i use union plastisol ink. I have a few questions about ink additives. I recently put in an order with my distributer for soft hand base. This is supposed to give the ink a softer less plastic feel. They were out of this and I was shipped extender base in it place. I informed the dist rep of this an the following is their comment:

The extender base effectively does the same thing as the Soft Hand, but it will not reduce the opacity of your ink as the soft hand additive does. It is a preferred and recommended product if you are printing with high opacity inks on dark garments or low-bleed inks on cotton/poly blends or 100% polyester. Although it does not reduce the viscosity of your inks, it will make the ink easier to print. You can add any amount to your ink, without negatively affecting ink cure.

Mind you this is coming for the distributer not the manufacturer. I was hoping some one could substantiate their claim. I checked unions web site and their description on the extender base says nothing about giving the ink a softer hand.

I guess my other question would be are either of these additives even worth my time as far as the results they will yield ? Lastly what other ink additives does anyone else out there use and why?

Thanks to any who have or will reply to my posts,

Dan

 

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Solmu

As far as I know they don't give the same result. One is intended to loosen the ink for easier printing (or to dilute a colour, bulk out the ink, etc.), the other is used to give the print a softer hand. The extender adds more base (i.e. plastisol without pigment), so it's not going to have the same effect on the hand.

I don't use plastisol though, so I'm only going by memory. I know it's come up on the forums (including a few times in the last week or two), so if you do a search you should be able to find the information from people who use both products (in particular I recall Fluid going over what they do/how they work).

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