Auto In the House Finally

[Inkworks]

That's how it showed up. Head # 1 has some ink on it's carriage and clamps etc. but the rest are pretty clean. Head # 11 has an assortment of abused parts, I assume they just got moved there as it was likely a dedicated flash head. The seller disclosed all of that to me prior to money changing hands.

I'm gonna need a better dryer next, the ol' Hix 2414 is going to be the next bottle neck, but then for us 3000pcs is massive, so as long as I can get ~250-300/hour out of it now I'll be ecstatic! Gonna have to go to gas, my electrical is maxed out.

[ScreenFoo]

Looks like a heck of a nice machine there--Servo sounds interesting--if 16x22 is "extra small", what were they running before?     (On ours, small is sleeves, or youth platens--but a much smaller press as well)

I feel your pain with the Hix--looks just like the dryer here but with more feed.  Keeping deposits thin we crank more than 300/hr if it's not a huge print, but it crawls when the prints get big.  Pocket prints we double fold and go pretty quickly.
Ran a 3K 14x20 print last month that got a bit boring loading and unloading by myself, but I guess, it was about the closest thing to time off I've gotten in a while.     

[Inkworks]

When the machine got here, it was set for "extra small" platens, we cycled the machine a few times with just the platen arms on and the servo "stop" point was dead on for the forks, when we put the adult platens on we switched it to "large" on the platen settings and the servo was stopping  short of perfect for the forks, I switched to "medium" platen setting and it was still just short of perfect for the forks, so I went back to "extra small" at the suggestion of Phil at Workhorse (who has been very helpful, even though it's a used machine. thanks Phil!) and it was back to lifting beautifully and shudder-free as it engages all of the forks.

These machines now can come with a "Duplex" option where you can use every second head and run true all-over with a print size of 40" x 50" so the larger platen setting are probably for that sort of platen load. Our trends tend to run ~10 years behind cutting edge, so all-over may be a good option down the road or at least close to all-over. But for now even 20 x 28" is huge compared to the max print size of most of my direct competition. As is the ability to print true 8 colours with 2 flashes and 2 cool-down stations along with the ability to go to 9-10 colours without cool-downs if need be. I already have a few customers designing based on the new print sizes and colour options.

I'll be looking for a good gas oven for the auto run flat-out and the manual running too, along with good air for water and discharge inks. The Hix was $500 shipped from Chicago and runs pretty non-stop for T's and a lot of our pad-print pruducts, so it's paid for itself many hundreds of times over. When we do get a nice gas oven the Hix will get dedicated to the padprint and graphic/parts screening line, which will also give us a bit more room as we won't have 5 different types of presses (Auto, manual, rotary clamshell and padprnter) all set-up to feed one oven  Good thing the belt on the Hix runs in both directions, or it would be a nightmare.

We'll be looking for decent gas unit 48"-16' or smaller....(244/Winston, if you run across something used 6 months or so from now.... Sprint 38/Heatwave or the like.... )

[alan802]

I think a 48" for the one auto with the occasional need to have another manual press or pad print being loaded at the same time will work great.  I'd say that if you plan on printing with the auto and manual at the same time, you might consider a 60" but the 48" worked for us because we always had just one press feeding the dryer at one time.  Now we are printing on the manual a lot more and the auto is usually running at that time as well so the 60" has been freaking perfect.  If you plan on doing a lot of WB & discharge, I'd not look at anything under 10' heat chamber.  We got a 12' heat chamber and we were running a 2500 piece discharge job last week at full speed on the auto.  The belt was covered but we had no bottleneck and I also have plenty of room to go higher in temp and belt speed if we needed to.  I don't know if you read any of my posts about our electricity bill being cut by about $700 per month since buying the new dryer.  Our old dryer was gas and IR panel and the new dryer is just gas, so the electricity draw from IR dryers is huge.  I'm not exagerating this at all, you will probably save as much in electricity to more than cover the payment of a new gas dryer, and that includes the added expense of natural gas.

[Inkworks]

Well after catching up on all the pad print and sign jobs put off during machine set-up, we finally have run a few jobs on the Falcon, so far so good. I had to re-tweak my original platen/head alignments, but that's what I get for doing that part myself.  I'm sure liking 2-3 second flashes the quartz give, as well as the big print/flash area.

I really want some winged floodbars too! I have an e-mail into Action Engineering unless you guys have any other suggestions for sources. (16")

As suspected the dryer is the limiting factor, but it still blows away pushing squeegees by hand. There are a couple of big 48" SPE gas dryers on Ebay right now, but they look way too long for the space I have. The price ($3000) sure would be right though....

The Al-83 is sure nice too, I have an integrator coming, but so far I've been exposing at 40-60 seconds depending on mesh and suspect I'll be able to cut that down once we run the exposure calculator as the screens show no sign of under exposure at all.

We're getting the 45 Hix retens stretched up and into circulation, I'm already seeing the need for bigger than 23 x 31's due to floodbar/squeegee clearances, which seem to be on the excessive side of safe on the stroke settings on the Falcon for clearance to the screen clamps..... I may tweak that a little...

It's a long weekend up here, I'm hoping to get the compressor moved outside and the air-dryer tucked out of the way and not just hooked up sitting in the middle of the floor. What a great day it was when a fishing aquaintance gave me the Devilbiss 45CFM chiller because he didn't need it anymore! And I'm sure glad I bought that huge parts washer as it makes floodbar/squeegee clean-up a breeze.

A diptank is now on the wish-list too, the Canadian Distributor for CCI hasn't returned my e-mail inquiry.