Does FN Ink Live Up To The Hype?
Here we go, my first time making a product review. The good folks at Ryonet sent me over some of their new FN Ink to put to the test and I figured why not film it? To be honest I was kind of nervous about it because I had no idea how it as going to turn out or even how to start, I didn’t want to end up with a total piece of shit here. Thankfully that wasn’t the case!
Right out of the gate, I found this new low cure plastisol is very easy to work with. It stirs up and clears the screen mesh very easily, not a common trait of most white plastisol inks. With a push or pull stroke I had no issues and didn’t have to apply any excessive down force to make it happen. Manual screen printers rejoice!
As for the prints themselves, the white printed very bright as both an underbase and a two hit setup. One thing I noticed was the pull strokes turned out noticeably more opaque than the push strokes, which is common but there are a few inks out there where I’ve been able to get away with it so it’s worth a mention. The fibre matte down qualities were very good, it took me a good thirty or so prints to get the hang of it but even the very first print came out well enough for most.
Being a low cure ink it flashes and final cures incredibly quick. All you need is 260 degrees to to get a solid cure out of it which will really help the people with smaller setups to speed up their production time, and it will also give us a little more confidence when printing on sensitive materials. I have seen plenty of people having some cure issues with it since making this video but that wasn’t the case for me. You have to remember a proper cure comes with dwell time at temperature, and I was able to figure out pretty fast that this is something all of them either forgot or didn’t know yet (we all have those beginner struggles). With 20-30 seconds of dwell at temperature, I had zero cracking or washing issues whatsoever.
It was mentioned that this ink was supposed to have a soft hand feel and in all honesty I didn’t notice a difference between the FN Ink and the other two whites I use regularly (Rutland Streetfighter, Lava Perfect White). But with that being said I know there are a lot of inks out there that have a really plastic feel that I don’t use here, so in comparison to those this would definitely have a soft hand to it.
At the end of the day the FN Ink tested really well. I am a really big fan of the black which is something I tested off camera unfortunately, but I can tell you that is my new go-to black. For a cost effective ink lineup it definitely performed above my expectations, surprisingly along the lines of a few of their much more expensive counterparts. I can confidently tell you it’s worth your time to check out, this stuff is pretty FN good.
