Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work. - Thomas Edison
We parallel our gauntlet weekly and sometimes twice a week. It's easy and doesn't take long. Perhaps the diamondback is better built than an old gauntlet, I wouldn't know, but if the platen mounts and amount of deflection are the same, it will absolutely need leveling. This is not a waste of time, quite the opposite-you will see faster setups and better prints.John, I've read many a good post by you but must respectfully disagree here. Keep in mind I may be out of touch with the newer presses however.Sent from my XT907 using Tapatalk
We parallel our gauntlet weekly and sometimes twice a week. It's easy and doesn't take long.
our M&R tech said we should level the press at least once a year. But then what does he know;)
John, you have a lot to offer and definitely know what you're doing. If you can install an M&R style press and never have to level that's awesome. <Not sarcasm by the way, if you can get an M&R to act like an MHM you have my full respect and aweIt looks like you work at Jak prints now? Congrats! I've seen vids of that shop and wow, looks tight. I've also seen a testimonial by the owner talking about switching the co. over to MHM presses b/c they were "constantly leveling" platens on their previous machines.This style of press in discussion does require periodic leveling under most conditions. I think M&R would back up that statement. How often you need to or choose to do that is really dependent on the shop. We do it at least weekly and it takes maybe half an hour or so to do two presses. They aren't typically very far out of parallel. We know that the linear travel of each print head is in plane with each other so we level platens to the printheads using a flood bar, screen holders to platens. It's simple and easy to do but it would be better to not have to do it, here's two things we came up with that reduce the need to level:An older Gauntlet like ours is often freewheeled by hand with the reset button depressed. We've concluded that most of the need to level the press comes from moving the platens with hands. We do what we can to minimize this issue but find it's easier to quickly level once a week than to have a press op going out of their way to grab the press at the back of the arm. If you have a press that has servo and half indexing that's one place where you can eliminate a big part of the need to level/parallel the press. Having adjustable squeegee pressure is another area to look at. If you set your chopper depth evenly and leave it there, you will always be applying even pressure on the platens as you adjust the psi up and down. On older presses or ones without this feature you'll need to have your printers use extra care when setting the print and flood pressure/depth to make sure it's perfectly even. Printing with correct pressure/screens/blades/etc./etc. is key but the above two items account for a lot of the uneven load put on platens, presuming you are doing the rest correctly.
you are correct when stating grabbing the pallets by hand and spinning the indexer can cause pallets to go out if manhandled. It all in the handling in most cases.
And I'm sure everyone on here knows this but platens / pallets are also not a work station and neither is the top of the dryer!