Cranfield operates an open doors policy towards, customers, suppliers and other stake holders. Pre-arranged site visits are routinely organized for school groups, student placements, and hobby groups.

Printers have also utilized the training provided by Cranfield and we regularly welcome groups for half or a whole day to cover the foundations of ink manufacture, rheology (the science of how things flow), colour matching and design constraints of various ink applications.

If you can’t get to visit us, let us tell you a bit about our 12,000 square foot facility: Cranfield owns nine triple-roll mills, fifteen mixers and a partridge in a pear tree!

• The Ink Factory
  The Ink Factory provides an ideal setting for the manufacture of quality Printing Inks. We use an array of triple roll ink mills to finely grind and disperse our dry pigments with vegetable oils. We compliment these traditional methods of ink manufacture with modern technologies such as digital colour matching.
• Colour Mixing Shop
  In our colour shop, we use high-speed mixers to disperse the dry pigments into a range of mediums such as traditional copper plate ‘stand oils’ and linseed oil varnishes. The dispersion process is often called ‘pigment wetting’ and the aim is to break down the clusters (agglomerates) of dry pigment and remove any pockets of air. Once all the air has been replaced by oil, the ink dispersion is ready for further refining in the milling shop.
• Milling
  We use traditional water-cooled triple roll mills to grind the pigment dispersions that arrive from the colour shop. The aim of ink grinding on a mill is to thoroughly mix the whole batch of ink and to reduce the average size of pigment agglomerates to the approved standard we set for each ink. At each stage of manufacture, we carry out a series of quality checks in our ink laboratory to ensure each batch we make meets the approved standard.  Once a batch of ink has been approved, the finished ink is dispensed into a choice of containers ranging from traditional metal tins to plastic cartridges.
• Quality
  In our ink laboratory we check any ink we make for strength, colour, tack, drying time, printability, viscosity, fineness of grind and light fast rating. We keep an ink standard for each ink we make so that we can be sure that our inks remain consistent from batch to batch and from year to year. Our company was one of the first to implement the ISO 9002 Quality standard for the manufacture of fine art printing inks.