National Clothesline

We haven’t done this is quite a while. This month I have some shirt pressing defects; what causes them and how to prevent them.

Whenever I am in a drycleaning plant, I am constantly evaluating quality. Many times I snap pictures, not so much for this column, but so that I can later meet with the managers at that plant so that we can remedy the situation by retraining an employee or adjusting equipment. Using those photos in this publication is a huge bonus because it can help a great number of people.

You’ve probably heard me say this before. An all-steam iron is not laundry equipment. You can’t use it to touch-up shirts!

Laundry pressing is done with high-heat and high pressure. One-hundred pounds of steam is 338°F (this is 100 pounds over atmospheric pressure, which is approximately 115 pounds of pressure on your boiler’s pressure gauge).

This is nowhere near the temperature of an all-steam iron, which is probably around 100 degrees lower.

Surely that is hot enough to turn your unsuspecting finger into a cinder, but you are not going to dry fabric quickly at that temperature. And, unfortunately, opting to go the spray-steam-on-the-wrinkle route doesn’t work like you may think.

Let’s say that you have vertical wrinkles on the back of the shirt around the box pleat. There are probably five ways to address that problem. (Six, if you include ignoring the wrinkle.)

1. Re-wash the shirt and start all over again.

You probably won’t do this and I doubt that I would unless I was trying to diagnose some sort of problem.

2. Putting the shirt back on the body press, spraying the wrinkle and re-pressing it.

Good thought, but it doesn’t work so well in real-life. This is because fabric yarns have a “memory.” It’s kind of hard to explain, but I bet that I don’t have to. I think that you all know exactly what I mean.

3. Pressing out the wrinkle with a hot head press.

As long as touch-up is done carefully and on the right piece of equipment (like a bantam body press), this is your best option for speed and quality. Unfortunately, touch-up equipment like this is not as common as it should be.

4. Steaming out the wrinkle using a puff-iron.

This isn’t all that common, but I do see it from time to time. This is a very bad option for two reasons.

The workflow sounds brilliant: the shirt arrives at the inspection arena and touch-up is deemed necessary. No problem. The puffer is right there and removing that wrinkle is as easy as can be. The employee holds the shirt over the puffer by the hanger with one hand and the shirt tail with the other hand. She momentarily taps the pedal and — Voila! — the wrinkle is gone and it could not have gone faster nor smoother! But there is a very big problem. Standby. I’ll get back to that.

5. Ironing out the wrinkle with an all-steam iron.

This is very common, but as I said, the iron lacks the temperature and the fortitude to handle the job. What will happen is shown in the photo at right.

You get the same result if you do what I mentioned previously – using a puff iron. But worse still, the press quality of the very shirt whose quality that you were aiming to improve is made poorer!

With this iron, the fabric is liable to show what I call “steam scratches.” You can easily avoid these “steam scratches” if you install a steam diffuser coupled with an iron shoe, but when you do that, you are really making certain that you don’t have a laundry iron.

The iron-shoe/diffuser setup kills the steam “jet stream” and turns it into a vapor cloud. But it also keeps the metal surface of the iron off the fabric, making it ten times harder (or maybe it’s a thousand times harder) to dry moist fabric. It might even be impossible.

And a footnote: don’t put an iron shoe on a steam-electric iron. The steam-electric iron is exactly what you want, but you ruin it when you add the shoe.

So the lesson du jour is to pitch that all-steam iron and get a good steam-electric iron, but you’re going to get some complaints and I’d like to take a minute to address those before you get cornered.

First of all, steam-electric irons are a pain-in-the-a** to install. Sorry about that. That fact doesn’t make me wrong. We are trying to improve the quality of your shirts. This is one of the steps.

Secondly, these irons can be a maintenance issue versus the all-steam variety which are comparatively trouble free. The thermostats get stuck, for one thing. Oh, well. This fact doesn’t make me wrong.

The person that you have doing touch-up probably won’t like the steam-electric iron as much. She might hate it. In order to remove those nasty pressed-in wrinkles, she will need to add a light mist of water and then dry it with the iron. The touch-up person may argue that the all-steam iron was quicker. Is that a valid point? Hmmmm.

Quicker at what? At NOT doing the job? (Remember the picture?)

“If you do what you always did, you'll get what you always got!”