slinging ink on barriers and waterpans inking up

[gapressman]

Hello everyone im new to this website. I was looking for some answers as why we are slinging on barriers. Im on a XL 105 10 color. We are using superior ink running at 1500. We have only had it for 6 months and it did it from the beginning is this normal for this press or is there something I can do to stop it. Ive tried to change the skew and put different waterpans in. Can someone give me any ideas i can try?

[UKPrintMan]

First thing that comes to my mind is that the ink seems to be emulsifying way too much especialy if its floating in the water pans. You will need to check your fount solution ph (i run at 5.0) and conductivity and match it to the ink recomendations, solve that, and you may solve the slinging problem too. I dont use a big press and dont use the same inks so my settings probably wont work for you but i am sure others using a similar setup can expand on what i have said, If my guess is right that is

What fount do you use? is it a buffered fount, Do you use RO or Tap water? do you use alcohol?

[nagrom]

Hello everyone im new to this website. I was looking for some answers as why we are slinging on barriers. Im on a XL 105 10 color. We are using superior ink running at 1500. We have only had it for 6 months and it did it from the beginning is this normal for this press or is there something I can do to stop it. Ive tried to change the skew and put different waterpans in. Can someone give me any ideas i can try?

Hello Gappressman.
It sounds to me like you are running with either an alcohol free metering roller with alcohol fount or the other way around, this would definitely give you this problem. For alcohol free the metering roller is much softer and carries a lot more water, it almost absorbes water into the rubber.

Best Regards

[Mike Herndon]

We had the same problem while running Superior inks in our SM102’s. Particles of ink would be floating around in the fountain solution and the ink would be slinging and misting everywhere. We would also get picture framing on the blanket and back cylinders causing a big mess. It took us a while to eliminate the problem and we never got rid of it completely with the magenta. Most of the problem was the alcohol sub breaking down the ink. We lowered our solution mixture from 1.75oz per gallon to 1.5 and that helped. We then raised the temperature of the printing units from 75F to 80F. Surprisingly this helped quite a bit, you’d think a lower temperature would work better but in our case we saw less misting with a higher roller temp. The ink was more stable allowing the pressman to use less fountain solution. Finally we had Superior change their formula for our shop. They ended up making there inks with a “heavy body” vehicle system. All these things combined pretty much eliminated our problems except with magenta. Our SM102s run at 13 all day long, the XL running at 18 could make the problem a little trickier to solve.

Mike

[gapressman]

First thing that comes to my mind is that the ink seems to be emulsifying way too much especialy if its floating in the water pans. You will need to check your fount solution ph (i run at 5.0) and conductivity and match it to the ink recomendations, solve that, and you may solve the slinging problem too. I dont use a big press and dont use the same inks so my settings probably wont work for you but i am sure others using a similar setup can expand on what i have said, If my guess is right that is

What fount do you use? is it a buffered fount, Do you use RO or Tap water? do you use alcohol?

We are using Rycoline and I believe it is buffered and also using tap water. Our mixture is 1.8 ounces of alcohol sub and 2.4 ounces of fountain solution per gallon.

[Mike Herndon]

We use Rycoline too in our SM102’s with vario, our settings when we where using Superior:
Fountain Concentrate- Rycoline Green Diamond 251, 2.0 oz per gallon
Alcohol Substitute- Rycoline Redux 6000, 1.5 oz per gallon
Conductivity 1700 when fresh, 3000+ when dumped, RO water.

We’ve only seen this problem with Superior and it's been 3 years since we used them.The alcohol sub breaks down the pigment Superior uses to make their inks. At the time, Superior made and specified their own pigments (most ink companies buy pigment from suppliers). We tested several different alcohol substitutes and never found one that worked better than the Rycoline (for our shop, every shop is different). We then shifted our goal to run the least amount of sub as possible, without putting to much dampening solution to the plate and eliminating our run window. This is when we started to experiment with roller temperature and what not and found a nice balance. Superior then switched the vehicle system to a heavy body. This helped because it allowed us to carry a better (more) ink film on the roller train to the plate giving us a wider window to run in and enabled us to use even less dampening, without changing the color of the ink.

There was no magic quick cure to fix this problem. It’s a combination of the ink, temperature and chemistry not working together causing the ink to break down. What was real frustrating for us is once we finally had everything settled down and printing well Superior doubled their pricing. We had to drop them as an ink vendor and go to someone else.

Mike

[Mike Herndon]

One more thing- you can send the ink out to a lab and have them do a pour off test. Basically they take a half pound of ink and mix it with 50ml of the chemical in question- either alcohol sub, fountain concentrate or both. Once it’s mixed to the lab specification they pour the solution off, the sub and concentrate should be the same color as when you started (green, clear whatever). They should not be contaminated with any ink.

A crude but sometimes useful test is to do the same thing press side with a plastic cup, dab of ink and 16 oz of fountain solution or alcohol sub. Mix them together then let the solution settle. You’ll see ink pigment floating in the chemistry if they’re reacting against one another.

Mike

[D Ink Man]

It would be recommended to try a different ink series from another supplier. I have personally seen this slinging, misting situation with contamination of the dampening system and fountain resrvoirs with the ink you mentioned. I have seen it at multiple printers, most notably on higher speed sheet fed equipment such as the Heidy XL105, when running over 14,000 iph. If you want a professional recommendation for an alternate series, I am here to serve.

[Paultheprinter]

hi,

i find most presses sling/mist over 13k and there is no real soloution to this although some manufactures do sell products aimed at reducing this. On press soloutions are to my knowledge few and far betwen, the only soloution is to up the water to lenghten the strands of ink and to stop them form breaking and flinging onto tie bars etc (i think its called floculation) but this particular problems seem to be more centred around the relationship between the ink and the fount, if i get ink and water mixing to the point you create an oil in water emulsion and you get pigments floating in troughs then the first thing i do is drop concentrations of additives and reduce roller nips and chek temp, i find theres usually a hint or two to exploit and track down the cause.

Paul

[gapressman]

Hi we are using superior ink and they are probably our safest vendor. So i'm sure we will not go with another ink. Heidelberg told us that our XL is considered a web press and u will not get it to stop. I just dont believe that. We sent our ink and water to lab and they said it was pretty good. I went to Heidelberg and they had a different waterpan roller in there 105 It was like a plastic roller. They are around 1500 bucks a piece. All the rollers are set every week and not all the units sling. We tried to up the temp on rollers and tank but ran into more calcium problems on rollers. The waterpans are banding bad. We are using Rycoline fountain solution. Is there a another fountain solution out there that we could try?