Impressions - April/May 2013 - (Page 68)

talking SHOP Digital Decorating Setting Up a Digital Print Shop Learn how to set up your digital printer to run at peak performance and ensure a return on your investment. By Kevin Kelly, Contributing Writer isn’t a way to isolate the digital printer in your existing space, you must consider doing some construction to create the type of area you will need. The amount of space needed will depend on the type of machine you buy. Are you considering a desktop printer that will sit on a table or an industrial machine with a large footprint? The latter may require as much as 1,000 square feet to properly operate and leave room for expansion. If you are using a tabletop unit with a heat press, you can probably get by with 150 square feet. You must decide which machine you will buy before you can determine the space requirements and the shop layout. For high-volume drying of digital prints, you’ll need a conveyor oven with a signiﬁcant amount of space. Dark shirts take longer to dry than white and if your dryer is not long enough, you may have to run them through twice. Photo courtesy of Blue Heron Industries, Little Falls, N.J. d ecorators currently adding a digital printer to their businesses have a huge advantage over those of us who got started ﬁve or six years ago. In the early days, before there was much history or experience to go on, many shops simply stuck their digital printers right alongside any preexisting process they offered, whether it was screen printing or embroidery. Little did we know that common contaminants like dust, lint and spray tack were keeping our machines from running at peak performance — if they would run at all. We also didn’t realize — although we knew we were using fast-drying, solvent-based inks — that if the humidity wasn’t high enough, the nozzles would clog almost as fast as we could clean them. Over time, the most persevering digital printer owners began to make the connection between production-level 68 Impressions | April/May 2013 machine performance and setup in an isolated,climate-controlled area away from the other equipment. Otherwise, the investment could be thrown out the window. There was a lot of frustration in the early days, as some decorators just gave up because of this situation and the lack of knowledge. A PLACE OF ITS OWN If you are seriously thinking about adding a digital printer to your operation, your next thought should be: Where am I going to put it? One of the most critical factors in your success will be making an honest appraisal of your facility and ﬁguring out how you will control the environment around the machine. If your shop consists of a 500-squarefoot area with a few embroidery machines, you will have a problem. If there PLAN FOR EFFICIENT WORKFLOW There are many methods for laying out order ﬂow. A key factor, and one that someone inexperienced may not know, is you will need plenty of room to pre-stage orders. Keep in mind that digital printing often is a lot of single or two-piece orders. If you have 100 orders of this size, utter chaos will surround your machine if you do not come up with a way to organize and process these jobs. You need plenty of room to be organized so that operators are not wasting time digging through boxes and searching for paperwork. I suggest pre-staging orders on rolling racks. Orders with their accompanying paperwork can be contained in individual bins that are arranged on a rack in the order they are to be printed. The more organized your pre-staging area, the more productive your operator can be in getting work out the door. Ideally, the operator simply has to grab the product, verify the paperwork and go right to the machine. In a smaller shop, the operator most impressionsmag.com http://www.impressionsmag.com

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Impressions - April/May 2013

Impressions - April/May 2013
Contents
First Impressions
From the Show Director
FYI
Product Gallery
ISS Conferences
Game On!
There’s a Cap for That
Should You Start a Preprint Line? Part 2
How to Maximize Your Resources
Setting Up a Mobile Garment Decoration Business
Shop Spotlight
Embroidery Design & Digitizing
Embroidery Production
Screen Printing Graphics & Design
Screen Printing Production
Online Directory
Digital Decorating
Classifieds
Ad Index

Impressions - April/May 2013