Wilflex Epic PCs and sim pro

[ZooCity]

I know quite a few are running WFX Epic PC system here.  We've found that their "book" formulas have too low of an opacity for most situations so typically all our mixes are done using the maximum pigment load according to the IMS.  I've had a hard time dealing with the opacity either being too strong or too weak with the system when printing sim pro. 

Pics attached of our last one (seps by Dot-tone) a six color- Grey, Yellow, Red, Green, Trans Black, Black -on Gildan DryBlends in White.  I had to pull back the green by adding 20% of base and found the yellow and red to be quite strong also when ran at maximum pigment.  Print came out just fine overall, smiles all around but I wanted to try and hone this ink mixing thing in a little.

 I actually like to oversaturate the colors a little on sim pro prints because we print them through 330/30 mesh and I know there will be some fibrilation after the first couple washings.  The over saturation meets the fibrilation halfway and the print winds up being on hue for it's time with the wearer.

To be clear, I understand that we can simply use our intuition as to how much pigment to load with up front v. adding base back in but I'm not clear on why the standard formulas can't be strong enough to print true without too much goofing around.  It seems a little too hard to find the sweet spot and, printing manually, I'll comp for the overly rich inks by running with a very light clean stroke but I wonder if we're losing some bridging doing this.

Does anyone have a different method of running these mix system inks for this?

[ebscreen]

Which base you running? Amazing?

[Binkspot]

We were using the Amazing base. Had trouble mixing exact matches (some not even close) and low opacity. Turn out we needed the 15000 base which fixed all the issues with the system, huge differance in the opacity, color matching and viscosity of the inks. We thought the Amazing printed nicely but there is no comparison to the 15000. There is a high opacity base avaliable now, haven't tried it yet but will be ordering some in the next week or two to try.

[ZooCity]

Standard Epic Base 15000PFB.  Works just fine for WOW, color matches are good, zero issues in the three years or so we've been using it.

I do want to get some Opaque base in but nobody has it in a gallon, don't really want a 5er of some base we might not like.  I wouldn't use opaque base for this kind of stuff though, instead we'd run opaque with max pigment load for colors in a PFP situation or something, not WOW.  I'm glad they came out with the opaque though since the standard spots are all fubar we're going to mix our own standards and having an HO option will be handy.

[bimmridder]

Are you adjusting the min/max base the software suggests?

[ZooCity]

Are you adjusting the min/max base the software suggests?

We pull up the pantone we want, make a duplicate and then reset it with the minimum amount of base it recommends for that color.  We rename that as 102c MAX, for example. 

All the standard mixes I've used with sim pro have been crazy washed out so we don't waste time with the lower pigment loading, the low pig mixes wind up getting recycled into max pigment mixes just about every time.  I'm thinking we might just start playing with 90-80-70% of max loading until we find the money spot where it's a strong color without being over saturated.