"He who marches out of step hears another drum." ~ Ken Kesey
If you can, can you elaborate on how you're separating your art Danny? All of your stuff looks fantastic when it comes to detail and color balance etc.I am still hand separating in photoshop, and while it works fine for most jobs, I have started getting some more complex art and want to start pushing the limits of my new press. I assume a rip is the next logical step, but I tried Accurip a while back and was mostly unimpressed...
This textile screen printing thing would be a breeze if we could all flash after every color. Don't get me wrong, I wouldn't turn down a 16 color press and if we could justify buying one I would, but you should know enough about screen printing to be able to print wet on wet a little bit. I know all the spot color stuff would be so much easier if we flashed after every color but it's just not feasible and we all can't go out and buy 22 station ovals so we can do an 8 color job in one revolution. I wouldn't mind getting a 12/14 to alleviate some of the "creativity" we have to implement with all the 6-8 color jobs on a 10 color auto but a 14 color I think would be excessive and with 3 flash units I think we'd get soft and lose some of our ability (only half-joking on that). I've always thought that a 12/16 would be the perfect configuration for a shop like ours. I know when we first started we had that 8/12 Centurian with 2 flashes and it was way better than the typical 8/10 press and when I first started looking at new autos, I couldn't believe that 10/14, 12/16 and even 8/12's weren't the norm. Looking back I see how green I was but in reality, I still believe the 4 station-to-color gap to be optimum. The argument has always been that you can pay just a little bit more for a 12/14 than you would a 10/14 and get two additional print heads but it always seems like no matter what you end up filling up those extra two heads with screens and you need additional cool down stations. Oh well, there's a good reason why my idea of the perfect press configuration is rarely ever sold.
I am pretty sure I had mentioned it in the thread about how they were printing in Portugal, but standard press configuration was 3 pallets per print head(like 30 station 10 color). That was probably just as standard as 2 pallets short of your print head count here(like a 10/12) is...