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screen printing => Equipment => Topic started by: Dottonedan on April 23, 2020, 11:08:24 AM
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We have a 6 color and an 18 color already. The owner is looking at bringing in other presses for the shop but I’m not sure what the benefit os having smaller presses would be.
For example, I see people breaking up the press sizes. Lets say a 12 clr and an 18 clr ....or a 14 and a 16. What for? I mean Take out money for a minute. Are there any “production reasons” to stagger press sizes other than space? Is there real benefit in a production scenario that would make having a 12 clr and an 18 versus just getting two 18 colors?
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I know of big shops that have added 6 color presses for the odd stuff they don't want their main presses to be running.
Like a 18 color press being tied up for a 1 color white on sleeves for 3,000 shirts x 2 sleeves. Keep that 18 color running front and backs and the smaller press running that type of stuff.
But I do see what you are saying. If it were me, id invest into the biggest machine that makes sense for the work that we do most of. As of now that would be 8 new platens (for face masks from action) HAHA!
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smaller presses produce more per hour. in some cases they can index faster because there is less weight to move around, but it's also the fact that they take a lot less to walk all the way around while setting up and troubleshooting. It is not a big difference, but could be 2%, maybe 1%. That is not much until you realize that if you are doing 300K impressions per year on that press, you've just added 3-5k pieces without raising your expenses. That's potentially $3K in profits.
pierre
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Was typing what Pierre just said.
I'll add that setting up smaller presses is usually easier as well, in terms of distance traveled.
Back when I was on the floor I put on a step counter and found I was walking 5+ miles a day!
In circles!
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Was typing what Pierre just said.
Back when I was on the floor I put on a step counter and found I was walking 5+ miles a day!
In circles!
Okay, I apologize for this post veering off topic, but going a little stir crazy as many of us are, I couldn't resist. A couple of SoCal boys on this one.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-GTwhdypLFU (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-GTwhdypLFU)
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Having the use of more flashes and cool downs is a plus, in all my years of printing we've only had a few jobs we couldn't do on our 7 color, but it would have been nice to have had more heads flash and cool down which would have made a faster easier job!
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Money and space not being an issue...
It’s really nice to be able to make a production schedule and adjust on the fly if all your equipment is the same. We’ve all been there when the 16 color machine is backed up with jobs and the 8 color is sitting idle.
There is certainly value to Pierre’s point of more efficient printing on smaller presses though.
I’ve also seen the art and sales department grow their color count as machine colors increase. And it doesn’t always translate to higher prices because the artist or sales rep “throws in” that extra color thinking “they have the room and it’s only one screen”. But that “one screen” 20 times a week really adds up.
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Just for my own sanity I walked down and walked around both my presses. 12/14 CH3D and a 18/20 Gauntlet 3.
18.44 VS 21.36. Load station to load station casual pace.
I think your mix of orders would be the largest factor for determining what press to get. But if I had space and money isn't a issue which I assume its not or you wouldn't' be considering 18 color machines. Then id get the bigger presses, just my thoughts. But I am in a shop where more colors are a good thing, our customers will pay for it and they can't seem to get enough of it. I believe if I put a 40 color pres sin here we'd be doing 30 color jobs.
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We have 4 autos here and all are different.... It's given me a good perspective on the various sizes of press. My suggestion is to determine are you adding the press to handle current capacity issues or are you adding the press to bring in new revenue streams that you would only get by having the larger press. If your doing it to just add capacity and help with a current bottleneck I would audit your last 6 months worth of jobs and determine the average amount of heads those jobs took up. For any real production facility I truly believe the smaller footprint the better if it can handle the bulk of your jobs. A good example is we have a press here with only 3 heads, and we run single color, 1 color foil, etc on that press as its much faster working around/on that machine for all those basic jobs(which we do a lot of)...... So I would really look at why you need the press and while everyone always says to buy bigger bigger bigger I say only buy bigger if it fits your shops business model. The last thing you want to do is run mostly 4 color and less with a fair amount of fleece and buy an 18 pallet press.... Changing pallet paper on that machine take double the time as an 10 pallet press and all that crap adds up in a production shop trying to get stuff out the door.
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We have 4 autos here and all are different.... It's given me a good perspective on the various sizes of press. My suggestion is to determine are you adding the press to handle current capacity issues or are you adding the press to bring in new revenue streams that you would only get by having the larger press. If your doing it to just add capacity and help with a current bottleneck I would audit your last 6 months worth of jobs and determine the average amount of heads those jobs took up. For any real production facility I truly believe the smaller footprint the better if it can handle the bulk of your jobs. A good example is we have a press here with only 3 heads, and we run single color, 1 color foil, etc on that press as its much faster working around/on that machine for all those basic jobs(which we do a lot of)...... So I would really look at why you need the press and while everyone always says to buy bigger bigger bigger I say only buy bigger if it fits your shops business model. The last thing you want to do is run mostly 4 color and less with a fair amount of fleece and buy an 18 pallet press.... Changing pallet paper on that machine take double the time as an 10 pallet press and all that crap adds up in a production shop trying to get stuff out the door.
Scrubbing pallets, or changing pallet tape on 36 pallets is quite the eye opener.
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Big presses are nice. Being able to handle any job that comes in on multiple presses gives us a lot of flexibility. But our 8 color is a must have for all the specialty jobs. We change pallets all the time on that press. Pocket pallets, youth pallets, offset sleeve pallets, safety vests that destroy pallet tape, etc. wouldn’t be very efficient on a 16 pallet machine.
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Was typing what Pierre just said.
Back when I was on the floor I put on a step counter and found I was walking 5+ miles a day!
In circles!
Okay, I apologize for this post veering off topic, but going a little stir crazy as many of us are, I couldn't resist. A couple of SoCal boys on this one.
@frog if you’re going to drop acid you should just stick to Roky Erickson
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=sZEi-13NqF0 (https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=sZEi-13NqF0)
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Really good advice in this thread. If you can only have one press I would say get the largest you can. The more colors the better if you only have one auto. We had 2 ROQs before. 1 x 12/16 color and one 6/10 color. We do a lot of multi color work and were finding that any job that was 6 colors or more had to be run on the larger press, often leaving the smaller press idle. With the MHM's we went with the 14/16 and 10/12. Since a vast majority of our jobs are 8 colors or less we can now keep both presses running when we have multiple multi color jobs.
As we move forward we are considering adding a 8/10 or 6/8 that would be used for low color counts, foil, digital, sleeves, etc.
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We have 4 autos here and all are different.... It's given me a good perspective on the various sizes of press. My suggestion is to determine are you adding the press to handle current capacity issues or are you adding the press to bring in new revenue streams that you would only get by having the larger press. If your doing it to just add capacity and help with a current bottleneck I would audit your last 6 months worth of jobs and determine the average amount of heads those jobs took up. For any real production facility I truly believe the smaller footprint the better if it can handle the bulk of your jobs. A good example is we have a press here with only 3 heads, and we run single color, 1 color foil, etc on that press as its much faster working around/on that machine for all those basic jobs(which we do a lot of)...... So I would really look at why you need the press and while everyone always says to buy bigger bigger bigger I say only buy bigger if it fits your shops business model. The last thing you want to do is run mostly 4 color and less with a fair amount of fleece and buy an 18 pallet press.... Changing pallet paper on that machine take double the time as an 10 pallet press and all that crap adds up in a production shop trying to get stuff out the door.
Scrubbing pallets, or changing pallet tape on 36 pallets is quite the eye opener.
The ROQ void pallet feature is great when you don’t have time or don’t need to change them all out.
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MHM also has a void pallet feature. I'm guessing M&R does too, but I don't know that for sure.
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Or double index?
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Or double index?
Except you cut your color count and flash ability in half I believe? Voiding a pallet just tells the machine never to print or flash that specific pallet. But the machine will still single index. It really comes in handy if you’ve got some odd job that requires a bunch of stations or print heads. Instead of buying say 36 or 18 pallets for an oval, or 18 or 9 pallets for a big rotary, you can just by 3 or 5 or whatever and just void out all the other pallets. We had an umbrella job that would come through twice a year that needed like 10 screens and 8 flashes. I think the umbrella pallets were like $900 each. It would of cost a ton to buy a full set or even half a set. I think this was on a 28 station oval so we bought 7 of them and then put them every 3 pallets. It ran at a snails pace but it was good second shift work.