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Ink cleanup

1843 Views 5 Replies 5 Participants Last post by  Squirts
When looking for ink remover I have come across products that mention that they remove plastisol inks, but have not seen anything that says it removes water-based inks from screens. We're looking for both a cleaner for routine cleaning after prints, as well as a product to remove dried inks in a screen.

We have a screen that seems to have gotten a bit of ink dried in it mistakenly and would like to try removing it.

Also, do water-based inks tend to dry faster than plastisol inks in the screen? if so is there a way around this? or is a plastisol ink recomended when doing multiple prints?
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From my experience it takes a long time to dry plastisol.

Just today I went to my bench and found a squeegee that I dripped some ink on a couple of days ago. It was still wet.

Whatever they use as a suspention in plastisol, it doesn't dry very fast.

The only time I use water based ink that I got from Speedball it just washed up with water if I got to it quick enough. Otherwise I had to nearly power wash it and once I use Greesed Lightning and just reclaimed the whole screen, taking the ink and emultion off. I'm not sure what would take just the ink off at that point.
ashiver said:
Also, do water-based inks tend to dry faster than plastisol inks in the screen?
Water-based inks dry in the screen fairly rapidly. Plastisol doesn't air dry at all.

ashiver said:
if so is there a way around this? or is a plastisol ink recomended when doing multiple prints?
You can get retarders to slow down the drying of waterbased inks, but it's still going to dry out. Plastisol has its own plusses and minuses, but it's probably going to be easier to use for a large print run.
tonym said:
Whatever they use as a suspention in plastisol, it doesn't dry very fast.
PVC suspended in oil I believe.

tonym said:
I'm not sure what would take just the ink off at that point.
I don't think anything does. If the ink thoroughly dries in the screen even reclaimer won't get it out. At that point you'll need to be looking at dehazers and so forth (basically escalating the chain of cleaners).
sorry guys, im new to this forum and me posting here makes some sense...ive got a sweater that has dry ink that i want to remove is there a type of solution to remove ink?
mingostarr said:
sorry guys, im new to this forum and me posting here makes some sense...ive got a sweater that has dry ink that i want to remove is there a type of solution to remove ink?
Spot cleaner and a Spot gun...
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