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I generally find heat a bad thing, our press is water-cooled to maintain an even ink flow. We run waterless plates and heat is the enemy of waterless to some degree, on cold mornings the press is heated and when it warms its cooled, the process is tuned to be best at 21c.

No trolling there Chris, it's exactly what I have been saying only explained better. I suppose you could argue that the most important part is the customer but that's another story :) In the OP's case I feel it could be pre-press related, but we really need to see some examples I feel.

Or paper??? Ink is only one part in a system.

PrePress is ALWAYS there, good design counts for most of the impact of a job, the eye will notice the design way before it sees any faults in the colour balance or that "little bit of picking" on the back edge. Everything in print is not always ink related, sorry to burst your bubble :)

I'm sorry but if your input is not good, it matters nothing what the quality of the ink is, only when you have quality pre-press, quality ink, quality paper, etc in conjunction will quality output be obtained. Garbage in = Garbage out. You must start at the beginning and that is PRE-PRESS.

Then it could well be you have issues in pre-press and/or design, nothing to be confused about. Both ends of printing are highly skilled jobs, have you got decent people in the pre-press area? Can you post an example of the work printed??

Quality source material - photographs, studio work, layout, design. Its a very tough question, do you have specific print problems or are you let down by your design team??

Thanks Prepper, we used to do that many moons ago, unfortunately nOt enough real estate on the sheet now. Today I upped the press temperature to 23c and stopped using any additives, theory was that the increase in temp would also lower the tack level, the theory it seems was sound. Managed a...

Thanks LukeW there is a colour shift but so far it's been acceptable, we don't print many skin-tones as our work is mainly studio designed stuff, very few real-life pictures. I guess this is one of the stumbling blocks of waterless - very poor support from the ink manufacturers, the major...

Tried the tack reducer in the magenta, not so good so we have swapped the laydown order to K-M-C-Y and got a massive boost in C-M trapping which was good but now we have cyan in the yellow duct. This was mostly remedied by adding the tack reducer to the yellow and we now have decent C-Y trapping...

Well, we are testing the new custom ink mix and so far the resuts seem promising. The colours are an almost perfect match to the ISO standard which is good, there are no signs of toning ether so the temperature range appears correct as well. I do have a small issue regarding magenta / cyan...

Well, yes, I am sure that all on here will know that. :) But am also sure that the OP is not suffering intermittent cyan catch-up on two presses simply because they are not running enough fount?

Good question there, ink coverage would be one of the variables that change with each job.

Yes but there is a balance point between ink and water, increase the ink and you need to increase the water (within limits of course) This problem does not sound like a balance problem, if it were then it would always be doing it, this is an intermittent issue but we have not found the variable...

Then there must be a pattern, different paper, temperatures, speeds on press etc ?????

How does running a heavier ink film prevent catch-up? My main question would be, Has this started recently, suddenly or has it always been a problem with this ink / plate combo? Also have you recently changed inks, plates or fount solutions?? Surely you have not always had this problem...

Great reply, thanks, this is where we are lucky only being a B3 format user, due to the small sheet size I can set my press to run just the colour bar all day if wanted, and to ISO standard :D We can't really disregard the TVI curves most of the time though as even on this fiddly sort of job...

THAT is how it should, and usually does, work. We have NO chemicals, NO additives, NO reducers, NO tackifiers etc in my shop, these were disposed of long ago. We only use one brand of ink, I only ever run process as well - no pantone, no metallics, no varnishes, I can expend all my effort on...

Thanks D, But surely having a weaker ink will mean I need a thicker film on the job to achieve my target SID value? This would sound like a recipe for set-off etc, I could be exchanging one problem for another? Also as I would be running a thicker film on the plate, my TVI values will be shot...

What sort of opening volume would you use, this is a new idea to me, only been printing 30 years so i'm still a trainee :) Are we saying that the ink does not keep building up on the roller ends (as i thought) but rather reaches a stable point that is simply higher than it would be with the...