Premium Racquet Stencil Ink - Water Based: Black, Red, White, Blue, Yellow, Silver, Green, Orange, Pink

Perfect

This is possibly the only water-based stencil ink for tennis racquets available on the market. This brand has the best selection of bright colors, and this is what attracted me - I wanted to try an orange stencil. Well, the fundamental problem with water based inks, as it turned out, is that synthetic polymer materials or synthetic coating on natural gut are hydrophobic, which means, they do not wet and repel water. If you dip a piece of string into water, it would form a droplet or two at best, which will just slide off the string. The same happens with this ink, to significant extent. It seems that some surfactants were added to it to improve wettability, ink when applied also looks a little foamy, but it is not enough. I attached a couple of pictures. The first picture, with a stencil, is natural gut / poly (Alu Power Rough) hybrid. You can see that ink does not stick to the strings too well, and forms droplets at strings crosses. I had to take a paper towel and manually remove all those droplets. The towel which I used quickly saturated with paint and became a foam brush of sorts. After 3 applications with dry time in between, I was able to get somewhat decent, albeit not perfectly even, layer of ink on the strings. The second photograph shows attempt to freehand apply the ink to different type of strings, I cannot remember what it is, most likely cheap synthetic gut. This ink does not wet those strings at all. It behaves like soapy water, but does not cover the string material. It is clear that it would be impossible to get a stencil pn that racquet with those strings.The applicator is quite standard, but design of the bottle is a little better than popular Gamma brand (which coats the strings infinitely better). In Racquet Art bottle, the applicator part has threads and screws into the bottle, in Gamma bottles applicator tip assembly is inserted into the bottle and is held by friction alone. The applicator itself seems to be quite similar to that of Gamma.Since ink does not want to stick to the strings, it is hard to get sharp transitions at the edge of the cuts in stencil. Also, since ink dries quite a long time (several minutes to perhaps 10 mins to completely dry), it is easier to accidentally smear the ink. Consequently, the stenciled image does not look as sharp as it could.By the end of the day, I was able to make a lousy stencil on my natural gut / poly racquet, while the same ink failed miserably on sacrificial racquets which I think had synthetic gut on them. I used those racquets and strings to improve my stringing skills about a year ago and they were sitting on the shelf ever since.For comparison, I hand-applied Gamma ink to the same racquet, and quality of coverage was like day and night.So far, I only used Gamma and this ink. Gamma is way better. This difference made me motivated to test some other brands to see how they compare.The only additional positive side, in addition to variety of colors and somewhat better bottle design, that I can think about, is that it dries slower and the risk that ink will dry in the applicator is low.Recommendation: stay away from this brand as far as you can. Most likely, it will not work at all, or will be a huge pain to apply and your stencil will look unprofessional. Also, as I learned, colors like orange are not as visible on the strings as I hoped. Black and red are more visible, and those are available from all major brands - probably for that very reason.I am not using it again. Goes straight into the garbage can. Should have trusted other reviews...

thinner than I wanted, does not work well.

Terrible. I tried using this and it had a wet/diluted glue viscosity which took a while to dry on my strings. Also kind of clumps and doesn't universally cover the strings well. Go with the Gamma one!

As advertised

This is the worst stencil ink I have ever purchased. The ink does not come out evenly and coats some strings profusely and some barely at all. It also comes out gloppy. The applicator tip is also cheap and does not work properly. This ink is impossible to use and shouldn't even be sold. Save your money and go with a better brand like Gamma.

Great item

I had some hopes even the reviews were only 3 stars when I bought this. When I got it, it is completely crap and even worse than the reviews. Super hard to paint on the racket and the ink doesn't come out. It gets super messy and the ink does not stay, one of the worst products I've bought on Amazon no exaggeration.