Buying Equipment

[inkman996]

Homer and others hit it as well.  Quality of life.  Id like to enjoy my job.  Nobody wants to fight a process otherwise we'd all be hand printing on a table can curing in a stove.  If something is faster it often means its also easier.  This leads to happier shop over all.  I am sure our next deal will be either another embroidery machine or a DTS or just something to burn screens faster period.  Our ameragraph is about our next bottle neck followed by our dryer.  So we have work to do to get those new deals going I HOPE this year or so.  I am sure by the "math" we will adopt DTS before the pros say I should.  That's ok, ill be happy and we will have capacity to grow into.

Here is a dumb question.

If you have bottlenecks then why don't you print five days a week instead of just 4?

If we printed 5 days a week when would we do separations?  When would we do screens?  Those are done on our 5th day, in case you missed that.

No I didn't miss it. Its an honest question Brandt, not trying to goad you or criticize. In our shop we run five days a week, we have one guy that is here every day cleaning and reclaiming and helping with set ups. Another guy is our main printer. I prep jobs every day with art and films and smb related stuff. I do not need a dedicated day just for seps because we have the staff to do the things I don't need to be doing. I am just saying if you are bottle necked then it might make sense to print on five days and hire a part timer if needed to make it possible.

[GraphicDisorder]

Homer and others hit it as well.  Quality of life.  Id like to enjoy my job.  Nobody wants to fight a process otherwise we'd all be hand printing on a table can curing in a stove.  If something is faster it often means its also easier.  This leads to happier shop over all.  I am sure our next deal will be either another embroidery machine or a DTS or just something to burn screens faster period.  Our ameragraph is about our next bottle neck followed by our dryer.  So we have work to do to get those new deals going I HOPE this year or so.  I am sure by the "math" we will adopt DTS before the pros say I should.  That's ok, ill be happy and we will have capacity to grow into.

Here is a dumb question.

If you have bottlenecks then why don't you print five days a week instead of just 4?

If we printed 5 days a week when would we do separations?  When would we do screens?  Those are done on our 5th day, in case you missed that.

No I didn't miss it. Its an honest question Brandt, not trying to goad you or criticize. In our shop we run five days a week, we have one guy that is here every day cleaning and reclaiming and helping with set ups. Another guy is our main printer. I prep jobs every day with art and films and smb related stuff. I do not need a dedicated day just for seps because we have the staff to do the things I don't need to be doing. I am just saying if you are bottle necked then it might make sense to print on five days and hire a part timer if needed to make it possible.

Our screens are cleaned on the weekend by part timers, that's not what I am talking about when I said screens. I am talking about burning, taping, checking for pins, sorting of the weeks shirts and seps are all done on Monday for the whole week.  This is handled by James and Shelly.  Since Shelly does our seps and Shelly is the printer thats not possible to be printing 5 days without hiring a new Shelly since nobody would then be doing seps if she was out there printing.  So until we replace Shelly for doing seps and/or printing, we print 4 days a week.  There are many things we can do here to make 4 days a week of printing not a issue by speeding up the printing, speeding up the screen burning and so on.  This is a big part of what the CH3D was for us.  More jobs, same print time.  Once we hit a level where this isn't possible and all bottle necks are solved other than adding a "Shelly" then we continue this way improving all the processes around her until its hands that we really need.  Machines are cheaper than people. 

[inkman996]

Homer and others hit it as well.  Quality of life.  Id like to enjoy my job.  Nobody wants to fight a process otherwise we'd all be hand printing on a table can curing in a stove.  If something is faster it often means its also easier.  This leads to happier shop over all.  I am sure our next deal will be either another embroidery machine or a DTS or just something to burn screens faster period.  Our ameragraph is about our next bottle neck followed by our dryer.  So we have work to do to get those new deals going I HOPE this year or so.  I am sure by the "math" we will adopt DTS before the pros say I should.  That's ok, ill be happy and we will have capacity to grow into.

Here is a dumb question.

If you have bottlenecks then why don't you print five days a week instead of just 4?

If we printed 5 days a week when would we do separations?  When would we do screens?  Those are done on our 5th day, in case you missed that.

No I didn't miss it. Its an honest question Brandt, not trying to goad you or criticize. In our shop we run five days a week, we have one guy that is here every day cleaning and reclaiming and helping with set ups. Another guy is our main printer. I prep jobs every day with art and films and smb related stuff. I do not need a dedicated day just for seps because we have the staff to do the things I don't need to be doing. I am just saying if you are bottle necked then it might make sense to print on five days and hire a part timer if needed to make it possible.

Our screens are cleaned on the weekend by part timers, that's not what I am talking about when I said screens. I am talking about burning, taping, checking for pins, sorting of the weeks shirts and seps are all done on Monday for the whole week.  This is handled by James and Shelly.  Since Shelly does our seps and Shelly is the printer thats not possible to be printing 5 days without hiring a new Shelly since nobody would then be doing seps if she was out there printing.  So until we replace Shelly for doing seps and/or printing, we print 4 days a week.  There are many things we can do here to make 4 days a week of printing not a issue by speeding up the printing, speeding up the screen burning and so on.  This is a big part of what the CH3D was for us.  More jobs, same print time.  Once we hit a level where this isn't possible and all bottle necks are solved other than adding a "Shelly" then we continue this way improving all the processes around her until its hands that we really need.  Machines are cheaper than people.

Thats great but some day you will come to the point where you will have to print at least five days a week. We couldn't possibly get by minus one work day of spinning the press and when it gets really busy as it is getting currently we have to work on weekends. The way i always felt if the machine is not spinning it is not earning money.

[GraphicDisorder]

Homer and others hit it as well.  Quality of life.  Id like to enjoy my job.  Nobody wants to fight a process otherwise we'd all be hand printing on a table can curing in a stove.  If something is faster it often means its also easier.  This leads to happier shop over all.  I am sure our next deal will be either another embroidery machine or a DTS or just something to burn screens faster period.  Our ameragraph is about our next bottle neck followed by our dryer.  So we have work to do to get those new deals going I HOPE this year or so.  I am sure by the "math" we will adopt DTS before the pros say I should.  That's ok, ill be happy and we will have capacity to grow into.

Here is a dumb question.

If you have bottlenecks then why don't you print five days a week instead of just 4?

If we printed 5 days a week when would we do separations?  When would we do screens?  Those are done on our 5th day, in case you missed that.

No I didn't miss it. Its an honest question Brandt, not trying to goad you or criticize. In our shop we run five days a week, we have one guy that is here every day cleaning and reclaiming and helping with set ups. Another guy is our main printer. I prep jobs every day with art and films and smb related stuff. I do not need a dedicated day just for seps because we have the staff to do the things I don't need to be doing. I am just saying if you are bottle necked then it might make sense to print on five days and hire a part timer if needed to make it possible.

Our screens are cleaned on the weekend by part timers, that's not what I am talking about when I said screens. I am talking about burning, taping, checking for pins, sorting of the weeks shirts and seps are all done on Monday for the whole week.  This is handled by James and Shelly.  Since Shelly does our seps and Shelly is the printer thats not possible to be printing 5 days without hiring a new Shelly since nobody would then be doing seps if she was out there printing.  So until we replace Shelly for doing seps and/or printing, we print 4 days a week.  There are many things we can do here to make 4 days a week of printing not a issue by speeding up the printing, speeding up the screen burning and so on.  This is a big part of what the CH3D was for us.  More jobs, same print time.  Once we hit a level where this isn't possible and all bottle necks are solved other than adding a "Shelly" then we continue this way improving all the processes around her until its hands that we really need.  Machines are cheaper than people.

Thats great but some day you will come to the point where you will have to print at least five days a week. We couldn't possibly get by minus one work day of spinning the press and when it gets really busy as it is getting currently we have to work on weekends. The way i always felt if the machine is not spinning it is not earning money.

Yes that's basically what I just said when I suggested a replacement for Shelly as printer.  That will mean we can print 5 days and she can do seps and other things while thats happening. I didn't say we'd run like this forever.  For now though, it works great.  We have very little issues.  Our print staff is exactly 2 people and they don't want to do screens and seps and print in the same day each day and since we don't have dedicated people for each of those things, they would rather print for 4 days and do the burning and seps all in 1 day.   At times we work on weekends when we can't make it work.  Rare these days.  Used to be all the time before we hired all our people.   When something becomes too big a issue around here we do something about it pretty quick. 

[mk162]

scheduling solves a ton of issues.  it still boils down to having enough time in the day.  right now, we don't.  i come in early to get screens cut for the week, some days I can do nothing but screens for 2-4 hours.  Screens can be the biggest bottleneck.

I usually bring in part timers to clean and reclaim once a week.  if jobs are counted, on carts and screens ready to go, it speeds things up greatly.

[alan802]

We have every process being done at all times but we're able to do that.  We've been working on a tough 7/6, 1700 piece job where my 3 guys are doing that and I reclaimed a dozen screens, coated a batch, and burned screens for the next 5 jobs on the schedule.  We're lucky because we have flexibility to keep up with whatever comes at us.  I can go out there and spend as much time doing anything from reclaim to running the auto and if we're not busy enough for my help out back I go do whatever needs to be done in the other building or stretch screens or build ink, or R&D.  The way we operate is when a job is being printed we're obviously focused on that, then when we're between jobs my printer is tearing down/setting up, one guy is reclaiming or coating and the other guy is staging jobs or helping with reclaim.  So we have myself, an artist, and 3 production guys which is really 2.5 with one of them part time working 4 days/week.  I can be considered part of the production crew but I spend half of my days not doing anything related to screen printing production but other times that's all I do 40 hours/week.  Our artist does more than seps and film, he handles all of the sublimation orders and occasionally will be out back in production helping with a print if I'm not around.  We are lucky because we have 3 of our 5 people in this building that can do whatever it is that needs done at pretty much any time we need to do it.

I have some big things to figure out with regards to how we handle our growth.  Do we keep the auto we have and go CTS?  Do we upgrade our press to something that we can squeeze a few more jobs a week out of?  Do we add a second, smaller auto to take some pressure off of the bigger one?  Hire more people?  Go CTS/LED?  We are getting closer to being maxed out with 3 guys and one 10 color auto.

[Socalfmf]

Alan

I know I have said this a million times...go dts...we were recently down for a day ( our fault ) and printing films...well it sucked balls...I honestly do not know how anyone can go back to doing that once you have seen a dts.  My artist wasted time printing films, my screen guy wasted time lining up films, it took us 70% longer to expose screens than it did with the dts due to going through the glass.  I honestly think if you upgraded to a dts you will be able to do 2 xtra jobs a day without any further labor...

sam

[inkman996]

You know what our biggest bottle neck is and no machine on this earth could change it? That is space! We really are at our max for space, there is no room for any new machines and even if we bought a CTS and increased our production it would make no sense since our space is maxed out and pushing more orders through would be chaos.

But back to the original question we buy based on both need and quality of life, it has to be balanced and not just a need to have something nice and shiny and bells and whistles. But if we do have a need for a new machine then buying the machine with decent quality of life makes sense.

[GraphicDisorder]

You know what our biggest bottle neck is and no machine on this earth could change it? That is space! We really are at our max for space, there is no room for any new machines and even if we bought a CTS and increased our production it would make no sense since our space is maxed out and pushing more orders through would be chaos.

No plans to expand? 

We bought our building with expansion in mind.  We have the back 6k sqft of our place rented currently.  So we can expand into that if we like.  We can also build another 90ft x the width of our building back if we need.  If we fill up all of that, then we got bigger problems lol. 

[inkman996]

You know what our biggest bottle neck is and no machine on this earth could change it? That is space! We really are at our max for space, there is no room for any new machines and even if we bought a CTS and increased our production it would make no sense since our space is maxed out and pushing more orders through would be chaos.

No plans to expand? 

We bought our building with expansion in mind.  We have the back 6k sqft of our place rented currently.  So we can expand into that if we like.  We can also build another 90ft x the width of our building back if we need.  If we fill up all of that, then we got bigger problems lol.

We are in our second expansion. Our first shop was only 1500sqf now close to 4k. Problem is in CT commercial space is super expensive and the value of our current building is not what it was when the owner bought it. Or eyes are always open for a good deal and was real close to a stand alone building twice the sqf but the seller would not negotiate on the price. We also almost bought the unit next to ours when it went up for sale but being in a commercial building that has multiple units would have required us to pay for two units in all expenses just not worth it.

[GraphicDisorder]

We are in our second expansion. Our first shop was only 1500sqf now close to 4k. Problem is in CT commercial space is super expensive and the value of our current building is not what it was when the owner bought it. Or eyes are always open for a good deal and was real close to a stand alone building twice the sqf but the seller would not negotiate on the price. We also almost bought the unit next to ours when it went up for sale but being in a commercial building that has multiple units would have required us to pay for two units in all expenses just not worth it.

Thats a tight amount of space for all you got going on.  If you are growing each year at some point that will be a serious problem. 

[ScreenPrinter123]

I must say that this has been an utter disappointment.  I was expecting some serious fireworks after reading the beginning of this thread.  You all must be in a better mood than me today!

[mk162]

there is a bunch of really great real estate for sale down here.  i am hoping to get a much bigger space if we get kicked out of here.

I would like to divide it and have other tenants rather than be the only business in a single building...we don't have many problems here because there is activity at night and on the weekends with some of our tenants...mainly the cab company

[alan802]

Alan

I know I have said this a million times...go dts...we were recently down for a day ( our fault ) and printing films...well it sucked balls...I honestly do not know how anyone can go back to doing that once you have seen a dts.  My artist wasted time printing films, my screen guy wasted time lining up films, it took us 70% longer to expose screens than it did with the dts due to going through the glass.  I honestly think if you upgraded to a dts you will be able to do 2 xtra jobs a day without any further labor...

sam

I'm ready to make it happen but the business isn't just yet.  We had a record year so you'd think we'd be primed and ready for a nice addition but we have to tighten some things up in a few areas before we can make a move.  I'm working on those now and hopefully this year will be the year.

[inkman996]

You know what our biggest bottle neck is and no machine on this earth could change it? That is space! We really are at our max for space, there is no room for any new machines and even if we bought a CTS and increased our production it would make no sense since our space is maxed out and pushing more orders through would be chaos.

No plans to expand? 

We bought our building with expansion in mind.  We have the back 6k sqft of our place rented currently.  So we can expand into that if we like.  We can also build another 90ft x the width of our building back if we need.  If we fill up all of that, then we got bigger problems lol.

Electician is coming in next week to rebalance our panel and see if we can practically install our second flash. Depending on what he says it might just be the push we need to expand.