Caligo Ink Factory
Our ink factory provides an ideal setting for the manufacture of artists quality Printing Inks. We use an array of triple roll ink mills to finely grind and disperse our dry pigments with linseed stand oils. We compliment these traditional methods of ink manufacture with modern technologies such as digital colour matching.

Environment
in 1999, Caligo was recognised as the Welsh 'Small Environmental Company of the Year' for the development of our environmentally friendly Safe Wash Relief Inks. Caligo Safe Wash inks are oil-based inks that can be cleaned with soap and water, without the need for harmful solvents. We introduced Caligo Safe Wash Etching Inks in 2005 and these remain the only oil-based inks on the market that can be cleaned up safely with just liquid hand soap and water. . Caligo also holds the ISO 14001 Quality standard for the environment and we make sure all our inks made with pigments that are free of toxic heavy metals like Chrome or Lead.

Colour Mixing Shop
We enjoy working with dry colour and fill our colour shop with specialist pigments ranging from the strong, vibrant colours of the modern organics to the more muted tones of the natural earths and the unique beauty of the inorganic colours such as ultramarine. Our range of black pigments includes Lamp Black, Bone Black, Vine Black as well as a variety of Carbon Blacks.

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 Once all the air has been replaced by oil, the ink dispersion is ready for further refining in the milling shop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 Shop
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 cans and tubes to plastic cartridges.

Quality Control
In our ink laboratory we can 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.