Neutral pH Fount

[BeauchampT]

Question: Anyone have experience printing with neutral pH fount (6.5-8.5 range) while running a web offset with heatset ink? What are your observations? Does it work well? Better than acidic fount? What sort of problems do you hit?

Also, if anyone just has some general thoughts on the subject.....?

 

[Cornishpastythighs]

Ran Neutral on a web but with EB ink (cousin of UV ink) It started out fine but as we got further into the run I had to continually increase my waters to try and keep the plates clean, after a while the whole thin went down the toilet and we switched back. That was a few years ago now so maybe things have changed. It was also recommended to me to run Neutral for Metallics as the acid can dull the metallic effects, tried it once but ended up back at 4.5pH
Good Luck

 

[Dan Roll]

Back in the late eighties I sold the Western Publishing plant in Cambridge Maryland a neutral fountain solution they ran on their M1000 and Hanthcho web presses (brush dampening) printing heatset process color work on both coated and uncoated papers. They ran the neutral product for a few years until a new pressroom manager decided to switch back to an acid product. Neutral fountain solutions are very popular with newspaper printers in the U.S., but neutrals are more expensive to protect from biological growth than mild acid products so I suspect more newspapers to switch from neutrals to acid products to save money. I field tested a few neutral sheetfed products in the early nineties that seemed to work just fine, but there was little customer interest in them so I turned my attention elsewhere.

 

[ABC/ALLIED EUROPE]

Hi,
ABC ALLIED PRESSROOM CHEMICALS is offering again Neutral Fount (Web Fount 6068).
We bring back this product to market because we had many requests for this type of product. Since papers start to be cheaper and cheaper people start to have many problems with paper fibres piling, paper coating dillution by acidic fount.
Now we have many instalation with fount pH 6.8-7.0 and its running very fine with most presses.

Best regards
Konrad
[email protected]