"He who marches out of step hears another drum." ~ Ken Kesey
He got the 12/14. I'm sure he will come out of the woods here soon, seems like he's been slammed, that's a good thing this time of year for sure! As far as side clamps go, I wouldn't have known how awesome it is to have front and rear, especially with a front section that flips up. really no comparison. At least from the Diamond back style anyway. I know the RPM notched the front bottom tips of their side clamps to give a bit of room for removing a screen, but still loading ink in from the side and not having the side clamps in the way, big huge aggravation situation gone!
Hey guys, finally made it back. Just an update on where I've been: my screen guy quit one afternoon with no warning about 2 months ago. No big deal, he worked about 28-30 hours per week and although he gave the press good screens he was incredibly slow at doing it. So for 2 months or so I was the screen guy doing everything in about 15 hours a week instead of 28 but that did cut into my "discretionary" time that mainly consisted of TSB and reading anything I could get my hands on about screen printing. So then about 3 weeks ago my printer quit, moving back to his home country for some strange reason but that was also a blessing. He was done, his quality was slipping and you could tell his mind was elsewhere and he had also started abandoning a lot of our core printing principles like printing with low pressure and speed with our white inks, so now we can reset. Both guys that are still with me noticed right away when I started printing how much better things were looking after the first day. I know the quality was always up to me but I was being pulled so many different directions the last 6-8 months that the time I spent trying to maintain our quality was low and the bad part was that my printer intimidated the other guys into not saying anything when I wasn't around and things got out the door. Not a good excuse, but I did fight as much as possible and was changing settings on the press a lot towards the end and everyone of you guys knows that me having to do that put a huge strain on my printer and I's relationship. I could only imagine how some of you guys would have reacted to me doing that but when you see things aren't right on press and he started doing things that made no sense just to get me going I had to do what I could do to make things look the best they could.But anyway, this has been a great reset of sorts. Everyone has been able to see where I'm needed more and I hope to be able to stay in the screen printing building most of the time. I'm training a guy that's been with us for almost a year to run the press. He's bought in to our methods because he's seen first-hand how they work against doing it the previous printer's way and he's excited to learn. Now, the guy doing my screens has struggled. The last few weeks we've had to send back about 25% of our screens and many of the ones that make it on press have killed our production speed. We've had days where if our screens were right we would have been done shortly after lunch, but due to screen issues we've had to carryover jobs to the next day. I'm talking about losing 3-4 hours on some days due to bad screens. Tons of pinholes, washing away stencil edges on underbase screens so top colors don't cover (it's very hard to see until you test print sometimes), putting film on backwards, burning wrong mesh counts even though I've written exactly what mesh to use on everything we burn, you name it, it's happened to the screens. Oh, and my favorite screen problem, busting them because you mishandled or put your nasty jagged thumbnail through them (seriously, has happened more than a few times with this guy). Next week I hope it all comes together for him, it has to or I'm going to be down a third guy of my 3.5 man team.There was a lot that went into the decision but really if you dissect it some it came down to only a few things that fell into place. We've been thinking about a new auto all year but I only got the go-ahead a few weeks ago so getting one by the end of the year ( most preferably, but not a deal breaker if there were no options) was a big hurdle. I spent some time with Rich at the Fort Worth show and also Danny at the Ryonet/Sroque booth so I had plenty of info given to me to make a decision. There is also a local shop with a new G3 right next to an RPM so that really helped solidify how things would work in the same shop. Nothing is perfect, but it's way more in line than had we gone with a different press and would have had everything on different pages. The G3 is a good fit. I can't wait to see what we can do with it. I expect big things since we've been able to crush my expectations with a really good RPM press now we have one that will outperform it by a large margin if we use it right. I can't wait to test out running it by myself and trying to hit 600/hr or doing a double stroke and still putting 800-900/hr on the belt. And what is going to benefit us most of all, the flash units and their integration into the press. The flash units on our RPM have been the only sour note on the whole machine and I can promise you it has cost us hundreds of hours of lost production over the years due to busted bulbs and random weak/hot spots and recently very inconsistent flash times. The new flashes for RPM have been much better but I wasn't able to get them for whatever reason despite some effort to do so (not entirely RPM's fault but it would have never been as easy as just buying them and them showing up a month later). After watching how effortless the M&R flashes gel inks I can't wait to run them. For years our flashes were very strong but would blow bulbs easily but recently our flash times have almost doubled and warm-up time for them has WAY more than doubled. And no, it's not the ink, trust me, I tested, and tested, and tested some more. Looks like I'm making up for lost time but it wouldn't be a post from me if it were under 500 words now would it. Another bit of info is we're buying the press from GSG since they had a 12/14 in their Dallas warehouse and we have a new compressor to buy and also have the electricians coming in next week to drop the new lines for the G3. And to round out the whole decision it only seems fitting since I've always had a warm spot in my heart for the old Gauntlet II. It was always my favorite of the M&R machines until the Challenger III came out. I had a feeling we'd have a CHIII one day but I didn't know it would be called the Gauntlet III. I also have been thinking about doing more videos and more specifically this transition and all that goes into it. I got a new Go Pro camera yesterday and for once it really paid to get the protection plan. They exchanged my old camera with no questions asked because it was acting weird and not working all the time. My only concern is do I have enough time to mess with videos. I don't want to do a few then just stop, if I do something I want to do it right or not at all. I haven't had enough time to post on my favorite forum so I'm not sure if I'm going to be able to handle editing and posting videos to youtube. Sorry for not answering questions directly, I'll jump back on later today and do so, no press to run today. Thanks to all for the congrats, it really is the best day a shop will have when that new press shows up. I'm pumped up.
Press will arrive in 45 minutes. All jacked UP!!!!
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Topic: Alan SRI Monogramming joining the GT3 Family!!! Woooooooop (Read 8382 times)
