New Locking Strips Available

[alan802]

I thought I would tell you guys about some new locking strips that I've been using lately.  I was really tired of buying the newman strips for $90 a 50' roll every week and one of our members here, Logoman, has a great product available through his website, max-tension.com.  I really like these strips, they are softer and work every bit as good as the high priced stuff but at a much cheaper price.  I've got about 15 screens done with them and they remind me of the older, light blue newman strips that were softer.  I've used them on 100-225S thread mesh so far with great success.  I haven't had any issues whatsoever by not using the newman strips and although I love stretch products, I've always felt those strips were way overpriced so I had to find an alternative. 

[JBLUE]

Where are they out of/ ship from? No address or phone number on their site.

[IntegrityShirts]

Meh, I still have about 6500 feet left on my roll of strapping lol. I'm good for a while!

[Gilligan]

What size did you end up going with.

I'm still struggling to find someone that has the proper size.

[ZooCity]

I have a good clutch of the older blue/greenish lock strips but they are starting to "cup" on me in their old age. The cupping is width (skinny width) wise and it causes mesh slippage, especially on LX and higher mesh counts which confused the living hell out of me for a minute when I screens appearing to "pop" at the roller but it was actually slippage.  So I need some more and will totally check these out.

One note here- I think a big part of what goes into the Newman lock strips is the material being resistant to swelling, deformation and breakdown with today's chemicals, which I would hope they are testing given the price of that stuff.  I would hesitate to give other material a green light before running it through a few reclaim cycles, just food for thought.

That said, our chem lineup is very gentle relatively speaking and the protection tape probably keeps a lot of the strip away from contact with any chem.

[jsheridan]

As a rep of Stretch Devices I must say that this is NOT a good idea.

a big part of what goes into the Newman lock strips is the material being resistant to swelling, deformation and breakdown with today's chemicals, which I would hope they are testing given the price of that stuff. 

That is a large part of it, the material, how it's made to very strict tolerances and engineered to lock along a single thread to ensure the mesh stays locked and square in the channels.

I gotta ask..

Alan, what is happening with with the old strips and why are you using so much 'new' locking strip. What is happening that isn't allowing you to re-use the old strips given you complain about the cost of new, what about money spent on past strips, isn't that the real issue here?

I rarely had to replace strips in the past even with a screen room volume of 500+ screens.

[alan802]

They are the same size/shape as the newmans, only a little bit softer duro.

I got a bunch of frames that didn't have locking strips and the ones that did have mesh in them were in rough shape and the strips had to be ripped out of the channels.  I do recycle the strips from screens that bust, but I'm stretching as many screens per week as I can of the frames I got last year so I've been burning through rolls of locking strip like crazy.  I've used 4 rolls since September and my goal is to get all the roller frames stretched by the start of the busy season.  I think I have 60-70 more frames to go and I've also kicked around the idea of selling the shurloc ez frames so we have one frame in the shop.  Plus remeshing a shurloc is 4 times the material cost of remeshing a roller frame although no maintenance or retensioning is involved with the ez frames.  I've got to get my guys to start stretching frames so I won't be the only one doing it.  Everytime I've taught someone they've quit, got fired, gone to jail or something to where I'm still the only one that can stretch a roller frame.

[ZooCity]

John, any thoughts on the "cupping" I'm experiencing on the blue/teal ones?  It was a downer to realize it was happening.  My thoughts were they just are that old at this point that it's time to replace- they have been through a high production shop previously that used "hot" chems and then me running very high ten (45-65n/cm) for a period as well. 

Wasn't expecting them to fail that way though, they no longer lock onto the mesh consistently or, if they do, they can only hold the grip at 20 n/cm and above.  I can overcome it somewhat by "massaging" them through my hands to eliminate the some of the cupping/warping.

Then again, they may not have been designed with smooth, slippery lx mesh in mind.

[jsheridan]

They are the same size/shape as the newmans, only a little bit softer duro.

I got a bunch of frames that didn't have locking strips and the ones that did have mesh in them were in rough shape and the strips had to be ripped out of the channels. 

Nothing you can do about that.. had to peel plenty out over the years myself then for some reason when folks switch to panels the strips disappear and now the new owner is on the hook for new ones. The plus too all this, when you finish all those frames, you'll have all new strip, yeah you paid a premium for the stuff but feel good knowing they'll last for a decade of more from taking care of them going forward.

John, any thoughts on the "cupping" I'm experiencing on the blue/teal ones? 

Those blue strips are the old material and after many years they do start to cup. They will still work on your lower mesh counts but as you remesh you'll have to replace them as your're finding they'll slip in the channel.


If anyone is buying used frames, the strips are part of the negation process so be sure to ask if they're there.

If anyone happens to have a pile of strips around as you went to panel mesh.. why not sell them here.

[Socalfmf]

Alan

this is not a blast, but I am trying to figure out why you have more than one type of frame inhouse....this is not just you, but a lot of people...

I would tend to think if you have multiple types of frames you are just adding more variables to the mix and it would be harder to figure out when there is a problem.  does this make sense? 

thoughts on all this?

[alan802]

Alan

this is not a blast, but I am trying to figure out why you have more than one type of frame inhouse....this is not just you, but a lot of people...

I would tend to think if you have multiple types of frames you are just adding more variables to the mix and it would be harder to figure out when there is a problem.  does this make sense? 

thoughts on all this?

Fair question, long story.  We originally acquired a shop that went out of business and they had about 150 newman rollers, many of them were the original batch of newmans made back in the early 80's.  Well, I'll admit my first few years back there I didn't have a clue as to what all the variables were and I had a supplier sell me on the use of statics instead of rollers and they basically took me to the cleaners.  I was trading in one newman roller for 2 static frames with some of the worst tension you could imagine, but at the time I didn't know any better.  Years go by, I finally start learning the basics of tension and frames and that's about the time I saw the shurloc ez frame system at the ISS show.  I loved the product and started buying them a dozen at a time until we had about 75 of them.  All this time we still had about 50 roller frames sitting in a corner collecting dust and that's when I really started to realize the role screen tension played in the process and I started meshing those frames up to use for our tougher, higher end stuff.  So I had about the same amount of roller frames and shurlocs in house but I had enough of each that we never had to mix the two screen systems within the same job, we did, but that's beside the point.  The off contact is about 1/16" different between the two frames so we stopped mixing them and now we have plenty of mesh counts with both frames so it's really only a matter of choice and how high of tension we need on a particular job as to what frame we use.  I was lucky enough to buy and acquire more used newmans to where we have enough of them now, over 150, to put into production.  That is right on the cusp of what we really need to have so I'm just thinking I could sell the shurlocs and finish up the roller frames and have one frame in the shop.  Having two doesn't cause us any issues but I can see there would be some benefits to just having one, especially when it comes to new employees.  I could also picture a scenario where we sold all the roller frames and kept the shurlocs and added some but that would actually cost us a lot of money to do that and right now, I'm trying to run as lean as we can so I can have more flexibility when it comes time to buy a new toy for the shop.

So, you can see how my ignorance at the time has put a little wrinkle into the shop but it hasn't hindered us or slowed us down up to this point.