Rubber or Oil Based Ink for Letterpress Printing

We created a video to show the differences in rubber or oil based ink for letterpress printing. We get this question a lot from new printers. We also took some pictures from the finished products below. It’s important to note that the end product you choose is completely preference. The end product often times will look very similar.Here is our overview video:

Here are the images of our final product test:

Here is a test with the rubber based print. The coverage is good. We never expect to get a full coverage with areas printed so large. We could tweak the ink some more if we were doing a large run. We would normally re-ink every 10 runs or so. This helps keep the printing consistent.

This is the test with oil based ink. You can see the inital coverage is a little better. The reality is it takes a little less ink then rubber based. So we may re-ink every 15 prints or so.