Realistic Production Standards

[jsheridan]

I cant explain it any better, if you cant figure it out by now.. smh

No.. hes not 180.. shirt stack is at his left side next to his hip face up.

Happy 4th, im out!

[Jepaul]

Small print and zero glue. Wish all jobs were that easy

24? stroke.  1383 an hour

https://youtu.be/xQkLs1-pROM


An M&R can certainly do this also.   

On long runs 800-900 an hour with plastisol on a basic T-shirt should be no problem at all.

8 hour shift realistically 3 people should get our 4500-5000 no problem.  Where you are going to miss your numbers is when your loader has to go get the next cart or shirts. Or stop to push ink.  Watch how much time someone will take to do those things. If every 300 shirts you miss 5 minutes that adds up.

[avogel]

After reading the upgrade press post and the direction it is going, I thought I would bring this back up and update our progress. I replaced one of our press operators with myself.
We are using 4 people total. We were having 1 person count and layout the shirts the day before. Then using a 3 person team to run the order, box, label and skid. They were averaging about 2000 per day.  We are now using the 4th person to unbox and stack as well as help with reboxing, labeling and skidding (they are doing some other duties as well). The job was a 4 color print, 8100 shirts, from start to finish took us 22 hours.

Our goal on these orders is still 3000 per day. Anything above 2700 I consider a really solid day. With only 1 auto I am evaluating whether or not these large contract runs are really worth it. Most of them are 1 or 2 colors so they aren't much money when that is all you do in a day. That is another discussion tho.

[royster13]

How many hours a week is your press working?....I find that most folks spread their overhead over 40 to 50 hours....Maybe 60.......But there are 168 hours in a week....If contract work is taking up time in the 40 to 60 hours, you are probably correct that it is not worth it if you have to delay or worse yet turn away retail work......But if you do it in hours outside the window where your overhead is already covered, it should work out okay....

[Maxie]

A lot of info about loading and unloading speeds, what about catching?
Our catchers can only catch and stack in organized piles about 600 an hour, we usually put the shirts in piles of 10.
Faster than that they just roughly stack and then have to sort them later or someone else has to finish the packing.

[Colin]

What are you having your catchers do - other than just catching and stack/folding the shirts? 

At 600 per hour my guys could catch/check for pinholes, mill defects, and bad prints/fold in dozens and usually get final size counts as the run finishes up so we could fill in any missing shirts.  Typically, they would box up after the run was finished, unless there was downtime during the run.  I wanted them to focus on making sure the product looked great and was finished properly.  I was pretty proud of how good they were at their job, very clean, great looking shirt stacks, almost nothing slipped by them.  Above 700 everything slows down though...

[tonypep]

Great responses on all sides however I believe Colin may be spot on with the human factor. While we may all proud of how fast our machines might be rated, I still believe this is our constraint. However perfect or imperfect that might be.

[Maxie]

Colin, what you listed is what we’d do, up to about 600.
Over that we either need two two people or to check and pack after printing.

[avogel]

This is exactly what we found with the catcher also. It was beneficial for us to add the 4th person. They unpacked the order and loaded on carts and also helped box, label and skid finished product. I used my screen guy for this, he still had enough time to emulsion and burn a few screens too.

[Atownsend]

We found our max today! 4400 prints 8 hours and a feel like a Cartoon character after loading that mess! We ran 57 doz / hour on the sporty, Which will dry cycle around 61 doz. Slower than the roqs / g3 / ch3. But it’s a benchmark for somethin. if we didn’t run a lint screen wouldn’t have made it in time. It hurt, but it’s on a apallet, wrapped and out the door wed!!! Woohoo!

[BP]

You can make that sport run 75 doz per hour.

[Atownsend]

You can make that sport run 75 doz per hour.

Whats the trick? All of our timers are @ zero, running flood & sq @ 10. I think I can go into the service mode and shorten the some of the delays (index / table rise), but I've been hesitant to do that. I could also probably play with the air on the table drop a bit, but I like it to run smooth and not shake apart! . Mind you this is a 10/12 Sportsman E circa 2009 (servo / AC) which we picked up on the used market last November. Maybe the new ones are quicker? Maybe I need to spend a weekend tuning her up.

Either way I have to admit i'm a little stiff from yesterday. And I run 20-30 miles / week. The human limit has definitely got to be around 4500-5K prints / day for a loader. I think I can confirm that!

[ffokazak]

Kudos on that run! 4400 is impressive.

Hopefully you had a cold beer to celebrate

[Atownsend]

 

Kudos on that run! 4400 is impressive.

Hopefully you had a cold beer to celebrate

At least 8 and a fat steak from Texas Roadhouse!

[1964GN]

This all has me wondering how fast we can print, and how long we can maintain that pace without driving our people into the ground. We have a potential job coming up that would be just under 80k impressions, white on red tees, somewhere in the 12" x 12" print size range. We have 2 ROQ YOU's and think, realistically, 4k-4.5k per 8 hours per press. That puts us about 10 days of printing without running a second shift (which we would probably do).

The real question is can our crew maintain that pace for days on end without becoming vegetables. Our shop doesn't have ac and the Florida heat is at it's peak. If we get the job it will be due on 8/31, so I'll report back and let you know