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General => General Discussion and ??? => Topic started by: inkstain on July 17, 2012, 12:22:25 AM
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Hey guys,
I'm a One Man Shop that has been printing manually for about 10yrs. My body hurts and business has been growing rapidly.
Good but hard on the body and brain. It's to the point where jobs are taking a lot longer to finish and at times turning down jobs. Crazy I know!
Anyway, I'm going Automatic next month, a dream come true I hope!
Any of you out there gone Auto from years of Manual? How did it change everything? Or did it change everything?
I'm hoping to have more time with the family and more time on art, clients, and not go home with a sore body.
Cheers!
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We we got our auto it was just Jill and myself...here is how your life will change
#1. you will not be so F'ing tired at the end of the day and you body will thank you
#2. you will get jobs done faster and faster...thus making more money and taking those last min jobs that you could not take before
#3. you will be done printing by noon for the first month because it really increases your speed that much
I could go on and on, but i think you get the point....1 think I would tell you is to make sure you have everything in line BEFORE the auto gets there.
-make sure you have the right screens
-make sure you have the airlines put in
-make sure you have enough electricity to the press for flashes yes flashes...having 2 is great
-make sure you dryer is up to speed with the auto...
and Congrats you have no clue to how your life is going to change
Sam
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One man shop here. I went auto a little over a year ago, had an oval before that but I wouldn't count it. I'm also not a full time screen printer as I have a day job 6.4hrs a day and I work the screen printing from 3-6pm M-F.
I've found that once you get in the groove of auto printing it makes a world of difference.
The biggest thing I've learned though is, do it in daily chunks:
Clean and coat screens one day.
Pick and stack blanks another.
Do art, print films, expose another day.
Only print one or two days a week depending on work load. Summers are slow for me in a college town, it's nice!
If you run around printing films, exposing, drying, stacking, taping, setup, printing, stacking, boxing, you'll go nuts. Set it up so you don't have to do the full process daily. At least that works for me, 3 hours a day.
It's hard to get away from the manual for jobs around 24 pieces at first because of the intimidation of setting up the auto. Set up multiple jobs on the press at one time. Once you're familiar with the machine you'll notice your manual collecting dust until someone wants a sleeve print lol.
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We were 2 person shop, went auto. That was just 1.5 years ago. Now a 6 person shop, and have almost 4x the embroidery heads because of it.
You can grow as about as fast as you want with a Auto assuming your pricing makes sense.
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We are a two person shop. We are going on our forth year of the auto. It frees me up to do other stuff while my co-worker prints.
Do you know what kind of auto you are going to get??
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We are a two man shop as well and when we got our first auto in 2008 we asked ourselves why we waited so long. If I was on my own there is no way I would be pulling/pushing squeegees having done it both ways now. Call me lazy but even if its 12 shirts I am putting that job on the auto.
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Same here we printed for years manually then whent auto and Sam nail it! print jobs fly, you take jobs you would not take other wise due to time and amount of printing, I will say this if your planing on hiring or getting bigger, get as many heads as you can now you'll thank yourself later down the line.
Darryl
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Take what Darryl said about the heads and melt it in your brain. If you think you need a 6 color get a 10. If you need a ten get a 12. When buying equipment you have to think down the line so you do not paint yourself in a box. We got a 10 and I wish it were a 14 sometimes.
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I have a 8 and and wish it was at least a 12 or 14. But I did start looking for a 6 color, so I moved from a 6 color to a 8 color at least.
For context there are MANY jobs I have done this year that I could not have done on a 6 color or smaller foot print machine. I would buy no less, not in any way shape or form less than a 8 color. 6 color you will hit walls fast.
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If you have more good work than you can handle, it's a borderline no brainer to me. Unless you do nothing but tiny orders, or weird locations, it's bound to pay for itself.
But I'm in agreement with most here--unless you're doing discharge only, or have some other reason for not needing a flash or two, get as many heads as you can.
Even though we don't turn down a lot of jobs for lack of capacity, I am wishing we would have had the room for a bigger press. Revolver mode is great for short runs, or in a pinch, but it is a time sink.
We have an 8/10 Gauntlet, and had a line on a 14/16 Challenger at the time--wish we could have made that bigger press work out.
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I have a 8 and and wish it was at least a 12 or 14. But I did start looking for a 6 color, so I moved from a 6 color to a 8 color at least.
For context there are MANY jobs I have done this year that I could not have done on a 6 color or smaller foot print machine. I would buy no less, not in any way shape or form less than a 8 color. 6 color you will hit walls fast.
Tell that to Gerry... I don't think he has had more than a 4 color job come in his shop yet.
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Going on 3 years and have had a total of two 4 color jobs so far. Countless 1 and 2 color and a sprinkle of 3 color. Makes it hard to justify the extra heads for me.
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Going on 3 years and have had a total of two 4 color jobs so far. Countless 1 and 2 color and a sprinkle of 3 color. Makes it hard to justify the extra heads for me.
Must be nice. I wouldn't know where to start with that type of thing. We rarely ever get 1 color jobs.
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I wonder if the number of multi colour jobs that come in depends on the charges for the extra colours......I have seen some price grids where the extra colours were very cheap....Therefore, I am speculating that those folks get more multi colour jobs than folks who charge more for the extra colours.....So maybe the discrepancy is caused by a pricing problem....
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I wonder if the number of multi colour jobs that come in depends on the charges for the extra colours......I have seen some price grids where the extra colours were very cheap....Therefore, I am speculating that those folks get more multi colour jobs than folks who charge more for the extra colours.....So maybe the discrepancy is caused by a pricing problem....
You sir hit it on the head. Your pricing and how you price will determine where you are cheap and where you are expensive. I have been working on my pricing and I have found many areas where I am too expensive and areas where I am way to cheap. I am working on a new pricing calculator that will give me full control of my pricing. Its going to take time but I will make more money and get more jobs that I want because of it.
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I wonder if the number of multi colour jobs that come in depends on the charges for the extra colours......I have seen some price grids where the extra colours were very cheap....Therefore, I am speculating that those folks get more multi colour jobs than folks who charge more for the extra colours.....So maybe the discrepancy is caused by a pricing problem....
Or another way to look at it is a pricing advantage... after all we are already handling the garment, the ordering, sorting, seps, screens, etc. Whats another color. Generally doesn't change many jobs time frame, and certainly ups the profit per.
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One man shop here. As everyone said get as many heads as you can. Then set some time aside to learn the thing. It takes time to learn to print on an auto. You have to plan ahead on everything job you do, make sure you use the right mesh and have enough EOM. Another thing set aside some money for training, it will save you weeks of time, I wish I would have done that in the beginning. Also don't think your going to be printing 500 shirts an hour on every job with just you. Running an auto by yourself is not easy. You have to watch everything. I average 250 to 400 shirts an hour when everything is going good. Good luck
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Printing on an auto with 1 person is kinda tough. You have to watch ink and lint. You can have a bunch of shirts screwed up before you even notice. The ideal way to run an auto is with 3 people. 1 loader, 1 unloader and a catcher/ ink guy looking over the shirts and keeping your screens inked. I just ran 100 shirts by myself and had 6 misprints that I did not catch until stacking the shirts. 6% misprint rate blows!
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Or another way to look at it is a pricing advantage... after all we are already handling the garment, the ordering, sorting, seps, screens, etc. Whats another color. Generally doesn't change many jobs time frame, and certainly ups the profit per.
So long as it is an advantage to you....But if you are at least breaking even on the extra colours, maybe by just charging enough it makes your multi colour prices very competitive and that might lead to extra volume....I used to work at a steakhouse that wanted to make so many $$s per plate....So the higher end steaks were a great value and that created quite a volume of business....
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Or another way to look at it is a pricing advantage... after all we are already handling the garment, the ordering, sorting, seps, screens, etc. Whats another color. Generally doesn't change many jobs time frame, and certainly ups the profit per.
So long as it is an advantage to you....But if you are at least breaking even on the extra colours, maybe by just charging enough it makes your multi colour prices very competitive and that might lead to extra volume....I used to work at a steakhouse that wanted to make so many $$s per plate....So the higher end steaks were a great value and that created quite a volume of business....
I am up 53% this year, and keeping more money than ever. Tripled in staff, more than 3x the embroidery heads, hey I don't pretend to have all the answers. But something is working for us.
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Royster...and Et al.
this is business 101..know what it costs to run your machines, know what your overhead it, know what your tax liability is...then figure out how much you want to make and finally what your market can bear....
it really is that simple...but again I bet I can count on 1 hand how many people here have a real business plan...and the ones that do are the ones that are doing better and better every year....
sam
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I say go with what your area needs, if it is multi color designs then go with the 8+ color, if you have a bunch of small color jobs go with 6 color. Just look at what you have been printing on the manual and go from there. If your wanting to get into some highend jobs ( other than process ) then spend the money. That brings up another point MONEY! Everyone cannot make that kind of investment. I say think it out do the research and Good Luck.
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Woah! Cool guys! Thanks to everyone for chiming in and giving me a good read for the day. I should have mentioned what I ordered and will be getting in mid august:
Diamondback S 8/7 / Shuttle Flash the bigger size one / no shirt detector / the regular size pallets / youth pallets and sleeve pallets.
Also, bought a Sidewinder Solo for the random prints, just in case.
Also got a 7.5 80 gal, ingersol compressor and chiller. The compressor is a beast!
All New Equipment! Christmas for days!!!
Gonna sell my 6/6 Manual press.
In the last 10 yrs or so I've only done two or three 6-color jobs. I mostly do 1-3 color jobs.
Probably the next thing on my list will be a new dryer. I know there will be some bottleneck there but just gonna have to deal with it for a time.
Thanks again guys!
Sam, I'll be calling you for sure at some time or another. Thanks man!
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Anyone who is not selling more colours often is probably not "selling" as much as they can....If you show your clients how much better a design will look with more colours and "nudge" them a bit, you will increase the value of your sales.....
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Anyone who is not selling more colours often is probably not "selling" as much as they can....If you show your clients how much better a design will look with more colours and "nudge" them a bit, you will increase the value of your sales.....
While generally this would be true, in the retail world the game is typically "I have this design.." and then you figure
out how to print it. Ranges from one to way to many colors.
My spellcheck doesn't like the Canadian "colour" BTW.
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Lot's of good replies so far.
24 months ago I was a 1 man show in 500 sq. ft. I was doing 80% pad printing along with parts and graphics screenprinting. Since I was already doing screens I bought a used 6/4 manual and that was the start of a crazy ride. It didn't take too many big multi-colour runs before I knew the next step was an auto. I took my time and shopped around for a good deal on a machine that would work for me and ended up with a 12/14 Falcon E with 2 big quartz flashes and a 20 x 28" print area. Most importantly I could run it without 3-phase, which the new 3000 sq/ft shop does not have. It was a huge leap of faith for me, but it's paid off. We now do garment printing to the tune of about 40% of our revenue and run 2-6 people in the shop. The 3000 sq/ft is full as we also added embroidery.
There is a definite learning curve of going from a manual to a auto, and much of that has to do with file preparation/traps/screen selection and pushing you comfort level with wet on wet printing. If you've already been doing that on the manual you'll be ahead of the game, but for many on a manual the flash becomes a crutch and I found that to be one of the biggest changes going to the auto. I had run autos at previous jobs, so I knew what to expect, but the $500 here and $2000 there to get all set up really got to be trying on cash flow. Some of the things that really added up was all the electrical, bigger exposure unit and light source, screens, compressed air dryer, screen racks, squeegee material, lighting, etc. etc. etc
My oven (24" belt 14' Hix with 9' of heat) is the bottleneck, but we can still push 40 dozen an hour without cure problems with plastisol. A small/medium gas is already on the wishlist for next year. As is a dip-tank and some bigger re-tens. we run 23 x 31s but they allow about an 18" tall print at the most due to squeegee/floodbar clearances.
Even with all the cost and challenges it was definitely the right choice. the first time you knock out 1000pcs. 5 colour shirts in an easy morning you'll wonder how you ever did it before on a manual. My 3000 sq/ft shop is packed with equipment now. I'm looking forward to settling in and rocking with the equipment we have, getting the new people trained up and smoothing out the workflow at the size we are, then hopefully I'll buy the building and add a 24' x 44' bay to get the signage shop out and free up some room!