Workhorse power horse dryers

[tonyt79]

Does anyone have one of these? What do you think of them. I am looking to upgrade dryers but really limited on space at the moment. The sales person tells me this dryer can be used for wb and discharge. I mainly do plastisol but wanting to do more of the other.  The price on these also look nice.

[Gilligan]

When pushed they will tell you it isn't designed for water based.

[jvanick]

I had a 3011.. even with the belt speed all the way down, I had to run discharge shirts through 2 times....

Definitely  not optimal.

When trying to use the 'flash' mode we got a lot of scorched shirts...

[bulldog]

I had a 3011.. even with the belt speed all the way down, I had to run discharge shirts through 2 times....

Definitely  not optimal.

When trying to use the 'flash' mode we got a lot of scorched shirts...

Same here. 3011 no good for discharge unless you want to go real slow. But I do like my dryer a lot. It gets to temp fast.

[mimosatexas]

I use a 36 inch wide by 10 foot long ANCIENT National dryer and do WB and discharge just fine...

It does require the slowest belt speed which makes for around a 1 min 30 sec dwell, and it has beastly forced air, but it works just fine.  I see my shirts in the wild a lot because I print for my wife's teacher friends and have loyal clients who have been reordering for years, and she and I wear shirts I have printed and cured in this dryer almost every day as well.  I have 5+ year old DC shirts with bright reds, whites, yellows, etc that when held up to unwashed samples from the same run are basically indistinguishable except for the shirt fuzzing up over time like it does regardless of ink type.  To be clear, the print itself is still bright and solid, but the fabric is "aged".

I couldn't print quickly on an auto with it, but as a manual printer it outpaces me just fine even on huge 21x15 full coverage prints.

[Screened Gear]

I have the 5217 Workhorse dryer. Its the biggest one they make. It has a 52 inch belt and 7 feet of heat.  I have run about 400 shirts an hour with a rather large and saturated DC print with no issues. The shirt is in the dryer 90 seconds, full discharge and no wash issues. It is dry here, if its humid in your area your results will be different. Electric can work. I wouldn't trust anything smaller then this dryer if you need good production numbers.

[3Deep]

I got a question, I hear you all talk about DC printing as a no go on a small is it mainly production speed or are you all saying small dryer's and DC don't mix.  I have an M&R Ecomax older dryer and I've done DC with it, yes production is slow but we only run thru once, we've did wash test after wash and no customer has brought any of then back from ink falling off.   Our dryer temp is set at 1000 which can get a shirt up to 400 in the tunnel if we run to slow and burn, I've  found the sweet spot for doing DC on our small dryer and I don't mine the slow production as we've really never had an order over 150 on DC.

darryl

[Colin]

Very very slow production runs. 

As you know your dryer needs to evaporate the water then bring ink to cure. 

If it takes a 4 foot tunnel dryer 2 minutes to do this effectively....   Your belt is traveling at 2 feet every minute, ouch....  A 6 foot tunnel at 1 minute 30 seconds is 3 feet per 45 seconds.  Figure you can get 1 shirt per foot maybe 2 on a wider belt, that's 6 shirts max per 1:30.  That's 40 shirts max in one hour.

The bigger your tunnel chamber and the more efficient your dryer is at refreshing its air (dry air) the faster you can run.  Smaller dryers are just not built for that.