What’s new in shirt finishing?
Ladies and gentlemen! Boys and girls! The Clean Show in New Orleans was such a
hit!
I have a special treat for you this year. You can watch movies of the equipment
and the products that I saw at the Clean Show if you go to my website at www.tailwindsystems.com!
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You’ve probably already read and heard that attendance, once again, was down, but I’m not convinced that this statistic tells the real story. I want to know how
many individual plants — how many distinct businesses — were represented. That is the true statistic.
In tough economic times, it makes perfect sense to cut down on the number of
people that you bring (or send) to the Clean Show, but it makes no sense to
blow it off completely.
Many exhibitors thought that the show was great because of the quality of the
attendees. The attendees were here, ready to buy. Please note that I think that
not coming to a Clean Show because you “don’t need anything” is very wrong. You always need to come to the show so that you can find out
what you need! That’s the point of the show — to learn what is available to you.
So, let’s take a look at what’s new in shirt finishing equipment.
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One manufacturer kicked me out of their booth three times in five minutes
because they didn’t want this publication to describe the technology incorrectly. The obvious
result is that they’ll get no publicity from me. And if I said things like “these clowns” were “pretty stupid”, my editors would scrub that or at least sanitize it, so you’ll get to find out who these clowns (oops!) are on my website.
The sad part is that they truly have a unique machine that should get exposure.
There is no other machine anything like this on the market. Their angle is not
to tell anybody. Pretty stupid, huh? (Oops! There I go again!)
Y.A.C. (the rock star formerly known as Prince, I mean FujiStar) has a new shirt
machine that didn’t quite make it to the Clean Show. There is a movie on my website that they
supplied but the unit is not yet available in the U.S. Sounds like it will be
soon.
Hi-Steam
This machine, TURBO-483, rivals the traditional hard-buck shirt finisher with
its speed and production, but with the added benefit of 25 percent less steam consumption.
How is this achieved?
First, TURBO-483 comes with super-heated form for shoulder and sleeve vent for
fast drying. This shortens pressing cycles and allows the operator to finish
50+ shirts per hour.
Second, the energy saver in the machine recirculates and reuses heated air used in previous finishing cycles, creating 25 percent less steam
consumption. This means the drycleaner can get substantial savings in utility costs and have a cooler work environment.
It is efficient to operate, as it (a) presses body and sleeves in one operation; (b) has automatic sensing of
shirt length for rapid loading; and (c) has automatic change between long and short sleeve shirts (with double sleeve
clamps and joystick controls).
With TURBO-483, there will be no broken buttons and few or no touch ups. The
machine is very simple to operate and gives a hand-finished look.
Like its cousins SAM-451 and JAZ-482, TURBO-483 can press all sizes of shirts,
from small to large, all types of fabric (cotton, silk, linen, Spandex, etc.) with no shine or discoloration on dark colored shirts. See this machine in action at www.tailwindsystems.com.
Unipress
Sankosha has been pressing the sleeve pleats on shirts for perhaps a decade and
now many manufacturers have taken the hint. That was the top innovation at the
Clean Show in my view.
I sure hope that my personal drycleaner gets a new machine that presses the
sleeve pleats on my shirts. I feel a bit like a Neanderthal when wearing a
shirt that doesn’t have perfect sleeve pleats now.
Like software and so many other things, someone comes up with a basic idea, a
version 1.0, if you will, and then others build on the basic concept. There
were several new machines that featured new ways to press the sleeve pleats,
but Unipress (www.unipresscorp.com) went about it in a most unique way.
The steam head that does the actual pressing is not flat. It is folded at a near
90° angle, which means that the pleats get pressed plus the sleeve gusset gets a
full press! Unipress has applied for a patent for this.
You know that really thick part of a shirt at the elbow-end of the sleeve
gusset? That part of the shirt gets pressed and nearly 100 percent dry — on a blown-sleeve unit! So, Unipress is phasing out its NT line and replacing
it with the AP line (an acronym for “automatic pleater”)
Unipress didn’t stop with the AP line. The company also introduced a product (meaning, not a
pressing machine) that I will tell you about in my upcoming column about new
products for shirt launderers and they introduced a quad collar and cuff
machine much like the Japanese have been making for a few decades.
This is a great solution for getting high production and top quality. Get a quad
collar machine (model Q4T) for $13,000 — far less than two conventional collar/cuff presses — and a pair of AP2 double-buck body presses and you can do 200 quality shirts
per hour with three operators. Sound familiar?
Unipress also introduced something called “e-force” on its entire line of collar and cuff presses. This involves a specially made
spring board that replaces the traditional steel mesh on Unipress’ collar machines.
The E-force is an ingenious way to slightly stretch the collar a split-second
before it gets pressed. This is done in a passive way, rather than with moving
parts. The curvature of the steam chest is of a slightly tighter radius than
that of the buck, which means that it contacts the edges of the shirt collar a
micro-second before the rest of the collar. This passively stretches the
collar.
Sankosha
Sankosha (www.sankosha-inc.com) changed a few features on its double buck shirt unit and its collar and cuff
machine, enough to give it a new model number — LP-185U. And that means that I can show it to you. I have a self-imposed rule
that says that I will only present new equipment that has never been shown at a
Clean Show before. So because of some modifications in the buck rotation
hardware and the fact that the yoke press rises out of the way a little bit
higher than the previous model 175 for operator ease and safety, I can show you
this new model here.
I love how hospitable the Japanese are, how polite they are to me and how
welcome I feel in their booth. I have some great movies — you know where — and a couple of surprise products from Sankosha that I’ll show you soon. Hint: when was the last time you saw innovation in products
for folding shirts, packaging folded shirts and pressing sheets, tablecloths
and other flatwork? Leave it to Sankosha to innovate! Stay tuned!
Not to be outdone, Sankosha also has a way to pull the collars taut an instant
before they are squeezed. That dip in the middle of the otherwise flat collar
press is stretched flat — along with the collar itself — just before pressing. See it live (sort of) on my website.
Ok. Change of plans. I am enjoying telling you all about these new machines, but
if I keep going, 75 percent of the pictures won’t make it to publication and the story may be too long to print, so I am going
to make the story about the Clean Show a four-parter.
Last month, we had to rush to press, so there wasn’t a whole lot of time to be very thorough. This is part two.
Next month, I will tell you about the new offerings from Trevil, Forenta,
Hoffman and Itsumi, plus the equipment from those guys that kicked me out of
their booth or wouldn’t show me anything.
A four-part column for Clean 2009 in New Orleans? Yeah, it was that good of a
show!
“If you do what you always did, you'll get what you always got!”
