National Clothesline

According to Google Analytics, a service that tabulates website hits and a slew of other things related to that, my January 2006 column about rope ties is, by a very wide margin, the most read article on my website.

I reintroduced the concept of rope ties after I saw the product at the Clean Show in Dallas in 1989. After pounding my feet on the floor to shake off the snow and after chiseling off the ice from my shoes (if you were there, you know what I’m talking about), I stumbled upon a product called no-knot cords, made by a company called Old Hickory Manufacturing out of Old Hickory, TN.

They made the product that you see pictured here. The product was originally used to wash roll towels. You know, those cloth towels on a roll in public restrooms that were in a dispenser that had the clean part of the towel unrolling and, as you pulled on it, there was a roller further inside the dispenser that rolled up the soiled part of the towel. If you are under 45, you probably have no clue, whatsoever, what I’m taking about.

If it makes you feel any better, knowing what I’m talking about isn’t important to making sense of what this column is about. Just think of it as an Andy Rooney segment.

The roll towels were fan-folded and then washed in a basketball-sized blob. After extraction, the outrageously long towel was sent through a mangler and was rolled on the outward end as it came out of the press.

The no-knot cord was not invented to wash shirts, but Old Hickory revived it and I ran with it as it became one of the many components of the Tailwind System. There are now no less than three additional products that were indeed designed to wash shirts. Roll towels pre-date these products by many decades.

The point of this article today isn’t exactly to sell you on the idea of rope-ties, as they have come to be called. If you want to read more about them, go to my January 2006 column. Still, I will remind you of the eight reasons to use rope-ties and then go on to comparing the available products.

Improved wash quality. Because the collars and cuffs are kept together, they can’t get tangled, plus the collars scrub up against each other to further improve the wash quality.

Increased wash capacity. You can fill a 50-lb washer with 50 pounds of shirts. This is a huge advantage. In many cases, you will get better agitation with more shirts in the wheel. Looked at in the opposite perspective: Maybe you don’t need an additional washing machine for $15,000, all you need to do is start using ropes to increase your total wash capacity by 30 percent!

Easier to unload the washer. Instead of pulling out 70-100 tangled shirts when the wash cycle is completed, all you need to do is remove a dozen or so neatly bundled “logs.”

Safer to unload the washer. The hazard of ripping off the sleeve of a shirt that is tangled in the wheel is gone. The shirts are tangled and the bundles unload easily.

Easier to manage the lots in process. Whether you have a strict lot system like Tailwind or a Neanderthal lot system like “these 175 orders are my west-side store lot,” that lot will be much easier manage because there are fewer components. For example, instead of having 100 individual shirts to a particular lot, there are merely 12 bundles.

Lost tags are such a problem. If a shirt is found without a tag, it is very likely to belong to the shirts being pressed right before and right after it because it was tied with them.

Helps prevent lost tags. Because the bundles are tagged right around where the tag is in the buttonhole, the tags are protected and far less likely to get caught on something and get torn off.

No more shaking out shirts. How cool is that? The shirts are already in a nice neat order. Simply remove the cord and the shirts are good to go.

I used the No-Knot cords for a long time — and still do — because the cost is low. And that is important because very often, when I introduce rope-ties to a new client, they may not yet be sold on the concept.

The difference in the upfront cost is significant. I am not in the business of peddling supplies. My job is to educate plant owners and inform them of their options. No-Knot cords are inexpensive and effective, but their drawbacks are clear: The cotton cords wear out and eventually end up in your sewer pipe trap and they can be a training challenge. If they are not tied tightly, virtually all of their functionality is lost. Quite frankly, most plant owners have better things to do with their time than to constantly remind and retrain their employees how to use rope ties.

MBH Enterprises, makers of the original Rope Tie, trumped the No-Knot cord by making the hook out of stainless-steel, the cord from polyester for durability and added a “T-Bar” at the end for ease of use. Three very nice touches. The problem of employee training still exists however.

I always had an issue with the Rope Ties because, as truly easy as they are to put on tightly, the problem of taking them off was always there. The rope remains in a hoop, so therefore removing them from a wet bundle of shirts was similar to removing a wet bathing suit from an uncooperative child. The rope tie is very durable, fail-safe, color-coded and has continually dropped in price over the years.

The problem that I had removing them lingered and the maker has long offered a remedy: hang the wet bundle on a pole or a hook and remove the rope in the same manner as you put it on. This works, but I’ve yet to see someone implement it.

But eventually, something comes along that makes us say “Why didn’t I think of this?” Enter the newest entry into the rope-tie montage of products, Cleaner’s Supply’s Rope-Tie with Toggle (RT-200). The hoop on this rope tie disconnects easily — sort of “unbuttoning” — after the rope tie is loosened slightly. To attach, you simply re-do the fastener and pull to tighten. Couple that with the color-coding and the durable build and we have quite a product here.

Check out the demonstration video in the photos and videos section of Tailwind Systems Facebook page (www.facebook.com/tailwindsystems).