National Clothesline

It’s the time of year to make that “Dear Santa” list. What do I wish for this year?

When tires for your car are made, there are built-in “wear marks” that warn the keen eye that the thread life is at its end.

We could use something like that for pads and covers. When I owned a shirt plant, I was always quite annoyed when the sleever bags were suddenly found to have a split in them in the middle of the busiest day of the week. Seems like we always found ourselves without the pads and covers in stock.

This meant extra touch-up labor for at least the remainder of the day. I cannot imagine how a pad-wear indicator could be incorporated into a laundry or drycleaning pad, but hey, it’s the holiday season and it’s time for me to compile my wish list and send it off to the North Pole.

It’s a list of products that I wish the laundry and drycleaning had available. I do the visionary work. I leave the engineering, tactics and the rest of the wet-work to others who care to step up to the plate.

Anyhow, the wear indicator on pads, covers, steel mesh and air bags would save drycleaners some money. Rather than witness substandard press quality as clear evidence that it’s time to replace something somewhere, you’d get a heads-up.

You could easily arrange to have your local guy change the pads and bags on time rather than wait until you have already paid for extra touch-up time, but it would be better if there was a way to see what awaits you in the near future.

You would have a distinct, labor-saving advantage if you had a way to know that the side bags on your body press were about to split or that the flannel was no longer as porous as it should be. Before your production suffers or before you need to hire an additional touch-up person, you could have those pads, covers and bags replaced sooner rather than later.

Along those lines, there is a fair amount of curiosity in this industry about automation. That’s not such a big surprise, but the fact is that automated assembly, for example, may not be what you think it is.

Automated assembly is cool, for sure, but it doesn’t save labor when compared to an efficient workflow system. But I believe that automation of some sort would save shirt launderers buckets of money.

I suppose that Santa’s elves should be able to come up with a “shirt doctor.” It would start at the damp box, where you would know that your shirts have the correct moisture retention.

Dozens of times, I have found a shirt press that has the cycle timer set to something that is far too long. The explanation is that otherwise “the shirts don’t dry.”

The simple turn of an adjustment screw costs you so many wasted labor dollars for who knows how many people, forever and ever, due to reduced production.

Even if the problem is fixed, that is, the extract time on the washer is adjusted to reduce the percentage of water that is retained, the problem still remains because the pressers are now conditioned to press at a slower rate. They like the extra hours and overtime, too!

And the “Shirt Doctor” could do other things too. Home clothes dryers rarely use timers anymore. There is a moisture sensor that shuts the machine down when the fabric is dry. Perhaps a new shirt press could do the same thing. Given that the moisture retention is correct, the press cycle would end when the fabric is dry.

If the time is too long, the “Shirt Doctor” would tell you that your pads and/or steel mesh need to be changed in order to keep dry time to a minimum and to attain maximum productivity. This is automation that would save you lots and lots of money!

I want a body press with an expanding collar block. Some pressers habitually overlap both sides of the collar before clamping it onto the collar block. The collar block is, of course, always the same size and many pressers tend to want to snug the collar around it.

That works fine for average size shirts, but if the collar is anything bigger than, say, size 16, touch-up around the collarbone area may be necessary. I’d like to see a collar block that expands to match the size of the shirt being pressed. In fact, it could be heated to do the job that a heated collar cone does now.

This could eliminate the cause of a great deal of touch-up which is failure to properly dress the body press.

Blown sleeve shirt units don’t do a perfect job on short sleeve shirts.

Many cleaners have resorted to not using the short-sleeve attachments on their body presses and opting instead to press them on a hot head after pressing or hand-ironing them in the touch-up area.

These are costly, relatively labor-intensive alternatives. I understand that the desire for quality trumps all, but I think that there is an easy fix. Some cleaners have turned to pressing the short sleeves on the collar machine before they go to the body press.

This is actually the option that yields the best quality, but it is a production killer. This way requires, in almost all cases, three separate lays for one shirt! One for each of the sleeves and a third for the collar!

So, what I want in a new generation of collar and cuff presses is a change in the arrangement of the three bucks so that the collar and both sleeves could be pressed simultaneously. This would create a rather unusual looking collar/cuff machine.

Forenta has an “unusual looking collar/cuff machine” that is close to what I am wishing for, but not quite. On Forenta’s 392VCHD, the steam chest is a bit too tall to allow the short sleeves of smaller shirts to be pressed concurrently with the collar, but it is close to what I am thinking of.

The Clean Show is six months away. Can any manufacturers get cracking on these much-needed equipment innovations?

“If you do what you’ve always done, you’ll get what you always got.”