How long would it take you to print 3,600 shirts?

[Stinkhorn Press]

brag if you want, but really want to just get an idea of how fast/slow we are relatively.

3,600 t-shirts 1 location white on dark PFP. How long would that take you, from setup to teardown, not just "if taking the fastest speed we ever do and pretending we don't ever stop to pee or smoke or re-ink, etc" ...

New this year to auto printing, trying to get a sense of what's possible, probable, generally understood as good/decent/respectable.  thnks

[TH Apparel]

we do on average 500/hour. 
3600, we would possibly have a 4th person to move shirts, keep the screens full of ink, box up and fill in when people need a break.

[TH Apparel]

oh...we would use two white screens...maybe 10-20 minutes to set up.  Longer to open all the shirts than to set up the press.
3600 is still a one day job from set up to break down.  Press doesn't stop running until the job is done(except to get de-lint a screen here and there)

[Ross_S]

We run 2 presses here so I would look at it like this.  3 people in an 8 hour shift.  The other press does the smaller orders.  But those 3 people would unbox, print, re-ink, box up and ship out.  I don't see it taking you more than a day unless it's some astronomically large print that is just sucking down the ink.

[Inkworks]

All in I'd budget a 1x 8 hour shift, 3.5 people.

[Frog]

For those wondering where Inkworks comes up with that half a person

[Prince Art]

Can't say exactly, but what I have is in line with what everyone else says. In my auto days, I comfortably ran a 7 second dwell time, loading & pulling. Add a second person to catch/count/fold/pack at the end of the dryer. So, that's around 500/hour, but doesn't account for re-inking & breaks, or for setup, teardown, etc. With a second person on press, you may get your dwell at or below 4 seconds (flash time is a factor); put a third person to watch ink levels, and you'll have fewer & shorter interruptions. (And get very tired.)

So... a big part of it is how many people you can allocate to the job. (Oh, and yes, do 2 screens for your PFP, like TH said. Don't revolve that thing.)

[3Deep]

I thought he got it 3.5 people from Opie Taylor (Poor Horatio the half boy)

[Admiral]

3 people 5.5 hours on press - Challenger III.

1 person would come from receiving to help for 2 hours spread out over the whole time to help box shirts and keep organized for the dryer operator, so add in those 2 hours of labor for it.

[tonypep]

Thats about right for us

[alan802]

3 people 5.5 hours on press - Challenger III.

1 person would come from receiving to help for 2 hours spread out over the whole time to help box shirts and keep organized for the dryer operator, so add in those 2 hours of labor for it.

Almost exactly how I'd manage it, pulling a receiving guy since there are 2 of them over there doing a one person job (don't get me started on that fiasco).  And also right about where we'd be with production numbers.

I'd say that's a good day's work for a one auto shop.  If you were in a hurry you could do it in 5 hours, give or take 30 minutes, but I'd like to use the whole day for a 3600, one side, simple print. 

We've got way more bigger jobs in line right now than we usually do and we've done approximately 15K impressions in the last week but I don't want to spit out the numbers we've done because it sounds like bragging , because it is...  But I'm happy with what we've been able to do so far.  I decided to get a snapshot/short run baseline on what our new capabilities were with both machines and with an easy print, on darks, with flashes running on both machines we can easily manage 1400/hr "real-time production rate" but I'm not sure yet on just how much we will average for an entire day.  We've got a lot of shirts in here but I'm not going to try and run them all in one day just to find out how fast, or slow we really are.     

[ZooCity]

2k/press/shift is the reliable figure we use for scheduling. 

Figure includes everything.  We are 90% fashion garments and blends.  7hr shift once you pull out breaks.

So this would take up nearly two shifts on one machine.  My production crew operates somewhere around 30% efficiency here, not proud of it but you wanted the truth, haha. 

[inkman996]

Won't bother trying to pin down all the exact times. Job like that would be considered a one day print job. We would use 4 people, 1 person is strictly material handling and covering for pee breaks. Two white screens and shoot for 700 or higher pieces ph. Minus any hiccups it should be an easy one day print.

[Sbrem]

We estimate with 500 per hour, it can be higher or lower depending on the job of course...

Steve

[Stinkhorn Press]

This is all very interesting. It's good to know there's clearly low hanging fruit out there. We are a bit slow. None of us have worked in any other shop so we're all new to auto speed possibilities.

Finishing up the run today, we managed 1080 in 2.6 hours = 415/hr, which would be 8.8ish hours print start to finish at that speed (ignoring any snags of course). That was us trying to be about as quickly controlled as we can be. PFP, auto, zero dwell, flash walked down from 5.5 sec to 3.5 seconds. Loader, Puller, Catcher – plus me floating (I'm about a half). That is all of our employees excepting the front desk (who was also un-boxing and hauling the full boxes to the warehouse but I could have likely fit that into my floating). Breaks for smoke were taken. Breaks to de-lint (fruit of the loom 100%) UB screen. 

TH: “Press doesn't stop running until the job is done”

I like the philosophy, but will be difficult to manage without additional employees at this moment.

Prince: “7 second dwell time, loading & pulling. Add a second person to catch/count/fold/pack at the end of the dryer. So, that's around 500/hour,  . . . With a second person on press”

wait wait wait, you could get 500/hr loading AND pulling yourself? That seems crazy.
We're at zero dwell, 2 people (plus the inker) on the press and only managing 415 (?)

Admiral, tonypep, Alan: “3 people 5.5 hours on CH III (plus a little extra, but not a whole person help)”

that's awesome. Just to know that's possible. I assume our holdups are: 1 no delint screen 2 old style quartz RPM flash (lowest flash time we managed today was 3.4 sec) 3 skill at load/unload.

ZooCity: “2k/press/shift is the reliable figure we use for scheduling. … My production crew operates somewhere around 30% efficiency here,”


that's probably FAR closer to anything we can hope to honestly achieve in the near future.