Equipment Regrets?

[3Deep]

Please do not name equipment brands, but I call myself doing research on buying a pad printer back in the day worst thing we every did, never made close to any of the money we put out on this machine.  Looking back now I should have also research buying the products to be printed with our machine and who our target market would be, we found out that coffee mugs are cheap but shipping them cost as much then you have damage same with other glassware.  Most places we bought our blank goods from also did pad printing and what they would sell to us for they could print for the same price or cheaper, but you had to buy a high amount.  I hate I bought the machine now which is a nice dust collector, but I also regret not doing all the research that I should have done lesson learned

darryl

[balloonguy]

Great story... I just bought a pad printer. I hope my story turns out better than yours did.I have no regrets on my purchases yet except that I always out grow my machines much faster than I expect to.

[tonypep]

Blade Runner...........but you knew I was going to say that

[bimmridder]

Still have it 

[royster13]

It is not the equipment that matters as much as the marketing effort you put into products the equipment can produce.....I know some folks that own "boat anchors" and others that "print money"....It really depends on your effort.....

That said, unless you are willing to invest in a skid of an item, the freight and breakage might do you in.....

[Inkworks]

Lots of used padprinters available out there with the same story. They just aren't an easy thing to learn, but once you establish a market, they are great. The last one I bought used was $200, and the first job I ran on it netted us $729.00 in 6 hours.

I don't envy anyone trying to learn them on their own.

I did just buy about 100 new pads off of ebay for $300 for the lot, and some of the larger ones are worth more than that on their own

My best local distributor of drinkware is just closing up their local warehouse and making things difficult for us, but I still get all our glassware and most importantly, Wineglasses from the far side of the country, free shipping due to our volume. 4 skids coming in tomorrow, Fall is Wine Season!

My biggest regret is probably the Squeegee sharpener, but it works like a hot-damn and I can easily get what I paid for it out of it, or more. it just takes up lots of room I could use and we don't abuse our squeegees so it hardly gets touched. 60" 6" diamond wheel and auto feed, the thing is a beast.

[3Deep]

Great story... I just bought a pad printer. I hope my story turns out better than yours did.I have no regrets on my purchases yet except that I always out grow my machines much faster than I expect to.

I hope you do good with yours, learning the pad print was really not hard at all, we had fun printing whenever we did it..pens,golf balls lighters, key chains etc, but the market here ask for small amounts which I thought at the time we could lock down, until I had to purchase products way over the amount we needed, and never print again.  We may try it again one day since I'll never get what I put into it, I might as well keep it.

[Sbrem]

bought a screen stretcher years ago of dubious design; it had bladders that filled with air to push up on the table holding the frames against mesh locked down in a larger, outer frame. What the hell was I thinking? Stupid is as stupid does...

Steve

[Anatolhelp]

1985 chevy chevette

[alan802]

I doubt there will be many "honest" answers in this thread even though there have been plenty of "ragrets" and bad equipment purchases that we've all seen fairly up close.  Buyer's pride is strong in this industry, and others I'm sure but I don't work in those.  I know there are a few things that we almost bought that I'm now glad we didn't.  A DTG machine for starters.  When I first started working here, the owners were getting the hard sell from the T-jet guys and one of the first assignments I had was to research the T-jet and DTG in general.  That was very interesting to say the least.  So we were fairly close at one point to buying one of those paper weights and I believe if I would have started here a month later than I did then I would have had to deal with a T-jet the first few months on the job.  When going through the auto buying process we could have gone 2 other directions than what we did very easily and one of those 3 choices I do believe we would have regretted it.  I've read way too many upset customers and there would have been a huge chance that we would have been disappointed like many others.  I just thank my lucky stars that we've got an auto that has done nothing but crank out shirts every day with no headaches or issues...yet.

My biggest regret, not necessarily buying the wrong brand of equipment but close enough:  Back when I first started we had nothing but newman roller frames out back and I had a few suppliers trying to sell me on static alums so I bought a few and loved how much lighter and easier they were to handle, yet I knew absolutely nothing about tension or mesh count and knew nothing about stretching and maintaining roller frames.  So my idiot brain decided to sell/trade our newman roller frames for static alums and I got rid of about 60 roller frames and acquired/bought around 130-140 statics from many different suppliers.  Then the next 2-3 years we struggled to print pretty much every job that came through the door.  I finally got fed up with struggling to print white ink on dark garments and started reading everything I could get my eyes on and that's when the thirst for knowledge started with me.

I guess I regret buying the numbering attachment to the Vastex manual press and the Vastex VRS registration system since we got absolutely no time savings while trying to use that regi system over the course of several months.  Then I started modifying it and butchered it up pretty good but still never got it to work worth a damn.

I've seen a lot of good buys on this forum over the years and have seen just a few terrible purchases that I know would never be admitted as being a bad buy.  I always hold out hope that the purchase doesn't hurt the business too bad and it usually doesn't hurt financially but when you compare it to what they "could/should" have bought I genuinely feel bad for them.

[TCT]

Second year in business bought a system that made screens you stretch in 3 sec. With a bright flash of light. Everyone has seen them at all the shows... I can in only "Xpress" my disappointment

[sqslabs]

I purchased a new piece of equipment shortly after it was first released, and apparently before the manufacturer had worked out the bugs.  It's gotten the job done over the years and we've just learned to live with the issues, but I'll be selling it soon and the resale value won't be near what it should be due to the defects.  Lame.

[Im-Magic]

I had a custom made powder glue applicator made for Plastisol Transfers. It works great but takes up three staff and therefore is not practical. It is a great $10,000 boat anchor,

[Binkspot]

Bet you think I'm going to say my auto but that's has worked out for us in many way. Pad printer has worked out for us but not used often.

Biggest mistake was the hat attachment for the manual. We had 100% spoilage rate with that thing.

[bulldog]

My biggest regret is buying a small startup package when I started. I didn't know what good equipment was and have since replaced pretty much everything and added new gizmos along the line too. It did get me going long enough to figure out I liked this and could do it on my own though. In my mind I try to justify it as a learning experience. =)