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screen printing => Equipment => Topic started by: screenprintguy on November 22, 2016, 07:57:03 PM
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I just waned to congratulate my buddy Alan for ordering a new M&R GT3 auto. I know you must be excited man!! You are going to love it man! Talk about starting your Texas holiday off right. Now you will have a new big Blue machine to match that killer Blue dryer you have bro! Congrats, can't wait to hear how you like it!!
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Congrats!
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Woah that's a big switch in tooling! From side clamp to front/rear, different squeegee/floods and pallets. Can't argue with the choice, but where does that leave the RPM? Did he also go DTS? I bet he did :) Congrats!
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Congratulations Alan. Here's to hoping you're too busy to be posting and we'll see you back soon.
Murphy
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very cool! Congratulations!
anything being added?
pierre
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Yeah - Congrats - looking forward to the cool reports!
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Woah that's a big switch in tooling! From side clamp to front/rear, different squeegee/floods and pallets. Can't argue with the choice, but where does that leave the RPM? Did he also go DTS? I bet he did :) Congrats!
I know he's slammed picking up for being down a body in the business right now, so I asked if I could post a contrats post. I'm sure he'll be able to give the full skinny. From what I know, he's keeping the RPM for now too, I think that's smart, I know we still use our DB and glad when we got our GT3 that we kept the old press. It will be in use, I'm sure of it. I know the going from sides to front and rear difference has been awesome for us, SO much faster, and the Teardown and park heads feature makes that so easy and fast for break down set ups. He's gonna love it. Not to mention how dam fast it is. ;D
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A little off topic, but why is front and rear faster?
I have front and rear on my Sabre but I'd think that side would be faster, but I've never owned side so I have no clue.
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front and rear is only an issue if you don't have an open space in the next head to remove the screen. Then you have to flip the head up, its just an extra step.
I prefer loading a side clamp machine, but I much prefer micros on a front/back machine.
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A little off topic, but why is front and rear faster?
I have front and rear on my Sabre but I'd think that side would be faster, but I've never owned side so I have no clue.
my opinion is that with the park heads feature and the flip up front screen holders, you can swap out (or rotate a screen if ganging) without removing squeegee and flood...
there's some weeks here where head 2 (our 'white' head) never has the squeegee and flood removed... just pull the screen, put the next screen in and go...
most slide clamp presses don't have a way to unlock one of the holders to swap out the screen, so you have to remove the squeegee and flood.
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A little off topic, but why is front and rear faster?
I have front and rear on my Sabre but I'd think that side would be faster, but I've never owned side so I have no clue.
Park feature lets you pull a screen out without taking the squeegee and flood out if I remember right. Front/rear clamps are faster but side clamps make double exposing on one screen easier so you can move the prints farther away from the center of the screen. If my press had front/rear clamps it would greatly limit the flexibility of exposing two sets of art on one screen. This isn't an issue once you get past a certain size shop/production I'm sure as Alan knows.
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A little off topic, but why is front and rear faster?
I have front and rear on my Sabre but I'd think that side would be faster, but I've never owned side so I have no clue.
my opinion is that with the park heads feature and the flip up front screen holders, you can swap out (or rotate a screen if ganging) without removing squeegee and flood...
there's some weeks here where head 2 (our 'white' head) never has the squeegee and flood removed... just pull the screen, put the next screen in and go...
most slide clamp presses don't have a way to unlock one of the holders to swap out the screen, so you have to remove the squeegee and flood.
We can remove the screen on our side clamps 2M machine without removing squeegee and flood. You have to move the print carriage all the way to the front and have the pallets in a half index position and it drops down quite easily.
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My opinion is side clamps suck ass compared to front/rear. When we had our dback I hated the side clamps all around. The only advantage I saw was the ability to have a longer stroke/use more screen but other then that no go for us.
But anyways, congrats on that big purchase! New equipment is always the best!
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My opinion is side clamps suck ass compared to front/rear. When we had our dback I hated the side clamps all around. The only advantage I saw was the ability to have a longer stroke/use more screen but other then that no go for us.
But anyways, congrats on that big purchase! New equipment is always the best!
I agree with Danny on my opinion, that's far as it goes LOL I like side clamps, but both have there place in many shops, all about what you like ;)
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Super agree with Danny. The flip up head on the m&r is fast and easy giving full access to the print carriage. Even if you didn't pakr, you can quickly drop the front of the screen down reach in and pull the carriage forward. I freaking hate the side clamps. The front rear carriage position sensors allow you to use the most of your screen too if you wanted to mirror designs on one screen, but that is up to debate on what us preferred for daily speed. I prefer to have fresh screens for every set up.
Cool thing in the teardown set up menu is you can activate heads that have set ups in them when you park the heads, hit one button and it sends everything that is on to the front position for quicker tear down. comes in handy when you have 11 or 12 screens to yank out. The ink dam feature and ink dip features we use daily as well, they are pretty awesome. So much stuff to use.
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Had side clamps, now have front/rear. I love them. Being able to switch my white screens out while keeping the flood and squeegee in is a great time saver. It's also easier to pull the screen out, then pull the flood and squeegee out. But I digress.....
Congratulations Alan!!! Those presses look really sweet.
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How many colours on this G3 monster?!
Congrats Alan!
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He got the 12/14. I'm sure he will come out of the woods here soon, seems like he's been slammed, that's a good thing this time of year for sure!
As far as side clamps go, I wouldn't have known how awesome it is to have front and rear, especially with a front section that flips up. really no comparison. At least from the Diamond back style anyway. I know the RPM notched the front bottom tips of their side clamps to give a bit of room for removing a screen, but still loading ink in from the side and not having the side clamps in the way, big huge aggravation situation gone!
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Hey guys, finally made it back. Just an update on where I've been: my screen guy quit one afternoon with no warning about 2 months ago. No big deal, he worked about 28-30 hours per week and although he gave the press good screens he was incredibly slow at doing it. So for 2 months or so I was the screen guy doing everything in about 15 hours a week instead of 28 but that did cut into my "discretionary" time that mainly consisted of TSB and reading anything I could get my hands on about screen printing. So then about 3 weeks ago my printer quit, moving back to his home country for some strange reason but that was also a blessing. He was done, his quality was slipping and you could tell his mind was elsewhere and he had also started abandoning a lot of our core printing principles like printing with low pressure and speed with our white inks, so now we can reset. Both guys that are still with me noticed right away when I started printing how much better things were looking after the first day. I know the quality was always up to me but I was being pulled so many different directions the last 6-8 months that the time I spent trying to maintain our quality was low and the bad part was that my printer intimidated the other guys into not saying anything when I wasn't around and things got out the door. Not a good excuse, but I did fight as much as possible and was changing settings on the press a lot towards the end and everyone of you guys knows that me having to do that put a huge strain on my printer and I's relationship. I could only imagine how some of you guys would have reacted to me doing that but when you see things aren't right on press and he started doing things that made no sense just to get me going I had to do what I could do to make things look the best they could.
But anyway, this has been a great reset of sorts. Everyone has been able to see where I'm needed more and I hope to be able to stay in the screen printing building most of the time. I'm training a guy that's been with us for almost a year to run the press. He's bought in to our methods because he's seen first-hand how they work against doing it the previous printer's way and he's excited to learn. Now, the guy doing my screens has struggled. The last few weeks we've had to send back about 25% of our screens and many of the ones that make it on press have killed our production speed. We've had days where if our screens were right we would have been done shortly after lunch, but due to screen issues we've had to carryover jobs to the next day. I'm talking about losing 3-4 hours on some days due to bad screens. Tons of pinholes, washing away stencil edges on underbase screens so top colors don't cover (it's very hard to see until you test print sometimes), putting film on backwards, burning wrong mesh counts even though I've written exactly what mesh to use on everything we burn, you name it, it's happened to the screens. Oh, and my favorite screen problem, busting them because you mishandled or put your nasty jagged thumbnail through them (seriously, has happened more than a few times with this guy). Next week I hope it all comes together for him, it has to or I'm going to be down a third guy of my 3.5 man team.
There was a lot that went into the decision but really if you dissect it some it came down to only a few things that fell into place. We've been thinking about a new auto all year but I only got the go-ahead a few weeks ago so getting one by the end of the year ( most preferably, but not a deal breaker if there were no options) was a big hurdle. I spent some time with Rich at the Fort Worth show and also Danny at the Ryonet/Sroque booth so I had plenty of info given to me to make a decision. There is also a local shop with a new G3 right next to an RPM so that really helped solidify how things would work in the same shop. Nothing is perfect, but it's way more in line than had we gone with a different press and would have had everything on different pages. The G3 is a good fit. I can't wait to see what we can do with it. I expect big things since we've been able to crush my expectations with a really good RPM press now we have one that will outperform it by a large margin if we use it right. I can't wait to test out running it by myself and trying to hit 600/hr or doing a double stroke and still putting 800-900/hr on the belt. And what is going to benefit us most of all, the flash units and their integration into the press. The flash units on our RPM have been the only sour note on the whole machine and I can promise you it has cost us hundreds of hours of lost production over the years due to busted bulbs and random weak/hot spots and recently very inconsistent flash times. The new flashes for RPM have been much better but I wasn't able to get them for whatever reason despite some effort to do so (not entirely RPM's fault but it would have never been as easy as just buying them and them showing up a month later). After watching how effortless the M&R flashes gel inks I can't wait to run them. For years our flashes were very strong but would blow bulbs easily but recently our flash times have almost doubled and warm-up time for them has WAY more than doubled. And no, it's not the ink, trust me, I tested, and tested, and tested some more.
Looks like I'm making up for lost time but it wouldn't be a post from me if it were under 500 words now would it. Another bit of info is we're buying the press from GSG since they had a 12/14 in their Dallas warehouse and we have a new compressor to buy and also have the electricians coming in next week to drop the new lines for the G3. And to round out the whole decision it only seems fitting since I've always had a warm spot in my heart for the old Gauntlet II. It was always my favorite of the M&R machines until the Challenger III came out. I had a feeling we'd have a CHIII one day but I didn't know it would be called the Gauntlet III.
I also have been thinking about doing more videos and more specifically this transition and all that goes into it. I got a new Go Pro camera yesterday and for once it really paid to get the protection plan. They exchanged my old camera with no questions asked because it was acting weird and not working all the time. My only concern is do I have enough time to mess with videos. I don't want to do a few then just stop, if I do something I want to do it right or not at all. I haven't had enough time to post on my favorite forum so I'm not sure if I'm going to be able to handle editing and posting videos to youtube.
Sorry for not answering questions directly, I'll jump back on later today and do so, no press to run today. Thanks to all for the congrats, it really is the best day a shop will have when that new press shows up. I'm pumped up.
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Congrats man! That sure is exciting!
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He got the 12/14. I'm sure he will come out of the woods here soon, seems like he's been slammed, that's a good thing this time of year for sure!
As far as side clamps go, I wouldn't have known how awesome it is to have front and rear, especially with a front section that flips up. really no comparison. At least from the Diamond back style anyway. I know the RPM notched the front bottom tips of their side clamps to give a bit of room for removing a screen, but still loading ink in from the side and not having the side clamps in the way, big huge aggravation situation gone!
Why not just load from the front?
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Hey guys, finally made it back. Just an update on where I've been: my screen guy quit one afternoon with no warning about 2 months ago. No big deal, he worked about 28-30 hours per week and although he gave the press good screens he was incredibly slow at doing it. So for 2 months or so I was the screen guy doing everything in about 15 hours a week instead of 28 but that did cut into my "discretionary" time that mainly consisted of TSB and reading anything I could get my hands on about screen printing. So then about 3 weeks ago my printer quit, moving back to his home country for some strange reason but that was also a blessing. He was done, his quality was slipping and you could tell his mind was elsewhere and he had also started abandoning a lot of our core printing principles like printing with low pressure and speed with our white inks, so now we can reset. Both guys that are still with me noticed right away when I started printing how much better things were looking after the first day. I know the quality was always up to me but I was being pulled so many different directions the last 6-8 months that the time I spent trying to maintain our quality was low and the bad part was that my printer intimidated the other guys into not saying anything when I wasn't around and things got out the door. Not a good excuse, but I did fight as much as possible and was changing settings on the press a lot towards the end and everyone of you guys knows that me having to do that put a huge strain on my printer and I's relationship. I could only imagine how some of you guys would have reacted to me doing that but when you see things aren't right on press and he started doing things that made no sense just to get me going I had to do what I could do to make things look the best they could.
But anyway, this has been a great reset of sorts. Everyone has been able to see where I'm needed more and I hope to be able to stay in the screen printing building most of the time. I'm training a guy that's been with us for almost a year to run the press. He's bought in to our methods because he's seen first-hand how they work against doing it the previous printer's way and he's excited to learn. Now, the guy doing my screens has struggled. The last few weeks we've had to send back about 25% of our screens and many of the ones that make it on press have killed our production speed. We've had days where if our screens were right we would have been done shortly after lunch, but due to screen issues we've had to carryover jobs to the next day. I'm talking about losing 3-4 hours on some days due to bad screens. Tons of pinholes, washing away stencil edges on underbase screens so top colors don't cover (it's very hard to see until you test print sometimes), putting film on backwards, burning wrong mesh counts even though I've written exactly what mesh to use on everything we burn, you name it, it's happened to the screens. Oh, and my favorite screen problem, busting them because you mishandled or put your nasty jagged thumbnail through them (seriously, has happened more than a few times with this guy). Next week I hope it all comes together for him, it has to or I'm going to be down a third guy of my 3.5 man team.
There was a lot that went into the decision but really if you dissect it some it came down to only a few things that fell into place. We've been thinking about a new auto all year but I only got the go-ahead a few weeks ago so getting one by the end of the year ( most preferably, but not a deal breaker if there were no options) was a big hurdle. I spent some time with Rich at the Fort Worth show and also Danny at the Ryonet/Sroque booth so I had plenty of info given to me to make a decision. There is also a local shop with a new G3 right next to an RPM so that really helped solidify how things would work in the same shop. Nothing is perfect, but it's way more in line than had we gone with a different press and would have had everything on different pages. The G3 is a good fit. I can't wait to see what we can do with it. I expect big things since we've been able to crush my expectations with a really good RPM press now we have one that will outperform it by a large margin if we use it right. I can't wait to test out running it by myself and trying to hit 600/hr or doing a double stroke and still putting 800-900/hr on the belt. And what is going to benefit us most of all, the flash units and their integration into the press. The flash units on our RPM have been the only sour note on the whole machine and I can promise you it has cost us hundreds of hours of lost production over the years due to busted bulbs and random weak/hot spots and recently very inconsistent flash times. The new flashes for RPM have been much better but I wasn't able to get them for whatever reason despite some effort to do so (not entirely RPM's fault but it would have never been as easy as just buying them and them showing up a month later). After watching how effortless the M&R flashes gel inks I can't wait to run them. For years our flashes were very strong but would blow bulbs easily but recently our flash times have almost doubled and warm-up time for them has WAY more than doubled. And no, it's not the ink, trust me, I tested, and tested, and tested some more.
Looks like I'm making up for lost time but it wouldn't be a post from me if it were under 500 words now would it. Another bit of info is we're buying the press from GSG since they had a 12/14 in their Dallas warehouse and we have a new compressor to buy and also have the electricians coming in next week to drop the new lines for the G3. And to round out the whole decision it only seems fitting since I've always had a warm spot in my heart for the old Gauntlet II. It was always my favorite of the M&R machines until the Challenger III came out. I had a feeling we'd have a CHIII one day but I didn't know it would be called the Gauntlet III.
I also have been thinking about doing more videos and more specifically this transition and all that goes into it. I got a new Go Pro camera yesterday and for once it really paid to get the protection plan. They exchanged my old camera with no questions asked because it was acting weird and not working all the time. My only concern is do I have enough time to mess with videos. I don't want to do a few then just stop, if I do something I want to do it right or not at all. I haven't had enough time to post on my favorite forum so I'm not sure if I'm going to be able to handle editing and posting videos to youtube.
Sorry for not answering questions directly, I'll jump back on later today and do so, no press to run today. Thanks to all for the congrats, it really is the best day a shop will have when that new press shows up. I'm pumped up.
Well Alan nice to hear from you again! Why no explanation of where you've been or what you've been up to? :P
We got a press release from your media representative the other day, nice to hear from you now!
I'm just messing with ya! Congrats man! I imagine you'll hit us with a good 2-4 sentences if info after the install... ;D
Sent from my LG-H918 using Tapatalk
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I was wondering where Alan had got to, was going to mail to find out.
Alan I'm sure you'll make that machine fly. Good luck.
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Congrats, that's press is awesome!
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Wow, finally got back on. I appreciate the congratulatory comments. Things are moving along. We're waiting on the flash units from what I was told. We can get the press delivered whenever we're ready for it, which hopefully I'll have made room for it by the end of the week. We still need the electricians to come in and drop the 3 new lines and move the RPM lines to it's new location. We also need to buy a new compressor, which I'm 100% for the rotary screw but will start a new thread on that subject mostly as a rhetorical question but perhaps someone will happen to stumble upon the thread and then actually believe what I've been saying...maybe, but probably not.
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Press will arrive in 45 minutes. All jacked UP!!!!
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Press will arrive in 45 minutes. All jacked UP!!!!
Enjoy the day.
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Hell yes! Happy press day Alan!
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PLEASE do more videos!
We keep going back and watching your old ones! Love your videos, man.
(we run an RPM and Joe's inks, so it's ALL been relevant to our interests)
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Unloading couldn't have been easier. To my Bro-in-law's dismay we got it all done without so much as putting a scratch on a pallet. Took 20 minutes or so, but the size of the pallets and the size of the forklift we would have needed I'm glad we used the flatbed truck. We had a great operator as well and that dude knew what he was doing, although he said he'd never yanked pallets or any equipment off a trailer before. This guy was a PRO.
Before the truck arrived I was getting grilled on how I expected to get the equipment off a truck with a flatbed and to be honest, I was second guessing that decision due to all the negativity surrounding my way of doing it. But it felt really good for it to have gone as smooth as it did with all the naysayers looking on as we made it look easy. And I can't take much credit, the flatbed operator could have done it all by himself with zero help from anyone. Don't let his PINK truck fool you, dude was a stud.
I would say if someone has a big enough forklift and the proper extensions they could have done it quicker, but the length and weight of these pallets and my 7+ years of forklift driving experience, I would have felt more comfortable unloading a press of this size with the flatbed. Info for those who are making the same move soon, don't be afraid to use the flatbed. We used the forklift on the RPM but the pallet size and weight were far less and it was still nerve racking doing it. Enough of my bragging on the unloading technique :)
She's safely inside the building, and I have a lot of video on the GoPro of the unloading, but I need to edit some stuff out, especially my bad language and some wasted time. I'm trying really hard not to rip into the pallets, but I did unbox the pallets/sq/fb. I'll try to take more pics and also get them up on this thread some time this week, no promises though, I'm a little busy.
It was great day yesterday, and today is even better!!!
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did you get the quik clamp squeegees? those are awesome!
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did you get the quik clamp squeegees? those are awesome!
Agreed! I think it's the best thing M&R has ever made in a sense.