National Clothesline

Gee! Is it already the end of the year! It seems like I just wrote this column.

It’s December and this is when I send Santa Claus my wish list. I compile a list of things that I believe will benefit shirt launderers and drycleaners that do shirts. The Clean Show offered an excellent array of new products — things I didn’t even know that I wanted, but I have always been very good at wanting things, so there are still a couple of things on my short 2009 Xmas Wish List.

Some owners/operators probably question the validity of claims that a double-buck shirt unit can produce 120 shirts per hour or even more so, that a single-buck unit can do 60 shirts per hour with one presser.

It is possible, and I’ve seen it done many times and have surely done it myself; however, I think that it used to be easier than it is now.

Shirt pressing equipment can be very dangerous. Even deadly. Because of that, there are many safety mechanisms built into the equipment these days. This is a good thing. No one wants any employee or co-workers to get hurt.

For all their benefit, some of these safeties (some would call them dummy buttons or idiot proofs) adversely affect the shirt press’s ability to produce. The best example of this is the two-handed control. The two-handed control means that you need to activate two buttons simultaneously in order for the machine to operate.

Furthermore, you must hold on to the buttons for a period of time — long enough so that you can’t get hurt.

That is better explained with an example. If you wanted to lower the steam head on your collar and cuff machine and it didn’t have some sort of safety mechanism, you could, in theory, push a single actuator button while your hand is resting on the buck. The word “Ouch!” is the quintessential understatement of the millennium.

Two-handed controls were introduced decades ago to prevent this. But they were not what they should be. When I first learned to press, you could jamb a matchbook into one of the indexing buttons and do exactly what I just described, including all of the horrific epithets.

The two-handed controls were subsequently redesigned so that you could not do that. Now, the indexing buttons must be depressed in near-perfect synchronicity or the machine will not operate.

That still isn’t good enough. The two-handed controls have been enhanced still more and many of you have cursed it. Now, you need to hold down the two-handed controls until the head-closing operation (or buck-in sequence) is nearly completed. This is done so that you can’t move your hand into the danger zone after the head has begun to close.

Without this safety, you could depress the buttons (and begin the steam head lowering onto the bucks) and then move your hand onto the buck and then find yourself sucking on a morphine pump for a few weeks.

Now the safeties are in place, but productivity is the compromise. In the old days, you could send in the bucks on your Ajax sleeve press and be unloading the collar/cuff machine before the heads on the sleever had even lifted to the proper pressing position, never mind having closed! You could really get production that is virtually impossible today due to built-in, albeit most important, safety features.

The biggest issue that I see is that there is no indication as to when you have held the indexing buttons for long enough. Perhaps every one of us has endeavored to actuate a press, only to find that the head comes up immediately because we didn’t hold the buttons down long enough. Then, in frustration, we attempt it again. Sometimes even a third time.

And then, we hold the buttons down for what is perhaps an exaggerated length of time. The manufacturers all say the same thing: hold the buttons down until the (in the case of sending in a body buck into the pressing position) buck is half way in.

I guess if you miss that “half way” point by a tenth of a millimeter, the machine laughs at you and sends the buck back out so that you can try again.

The real problem is when an operator has taught himself to never let that happen and depresses the indexing buttons until the heads close or nearly close; that is, too long a period of time. Production is affected in this scenario.

So, Santa Bartholomew Claus, may I please have a shirt press that lets me know, decisively, when I can let go of the buttons? A light that illuminates when you can let go would work, albeit subtle. Maybe an annoying audible signal that goes on when you’re depressing the buttons, but no longer have to!

That’s it! No sound is emitted when you index the buck (or head), but when the buck reaches the point where the buttons no longer need to be depressed, an electronic buzzer would sound, but would shut off as soon as the operator released the buttons. This would discourage the operator from depressing the buttons longer than necessary!

I hope that someone hops on this!

The other item on my short list is an inexpensive shirt folding machine. There simply must be something in between Cleaner’s Supply’s $15 shirt folding board (flip-fold) and Sankosha’s elaborate shirt folding robotic machine (there’s a movie of it on my website).

I imagine something like Iowa Techniques’ shirt scrubbing board but with a simple mechanism on top of it, sort of like the Cleaners’ Supply item. So maybe it would be better described as a flip-fold on an angled table stand. And this would sell for something like $150.

Regular folding machines are just too expensive. (Note to prospective shirt-folding-table manufacturers: We can only get a few dimes more for a folded shirt and much of that goes to the packaging materials and the rest completely vanishes in extra labor cost to the point that folded shirts are a losing proposition. Keep that in mind when you price a shirt folded! Have mercy!)

And as always (and so appropriate this month) …….

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