It is never a good time to install large machinery, and the interruption in production certainly makes the busier periods a time to avoid. When you add the removal of a wall to the scenario it becomes a much bigger under taking, one which requires a little bit of time management and regrettably a couple of months away from the blog.

Thanks to EDT Services for making a very quick job of removing our partition spilling very little dust in the process, obviously the last thing we need in our workshops is dust. EDT were very helpful in working weekends and evenings creating minimal disruption to our output. With the wall removed we were able to start bringing in the TAS (T-shirt printing machine) piece by piece.

The  base of the machine could have been separated into 2 pieces for easier transportation, but it was left as one to save time re-assembling the machine, this was an extremely heavy piece of  machinery and would be nearly impossible to man-handle into the workshops, with a little help from Acland who are conveniently just around the corner it was popped through our doors on the front of their JCB loadall with no problem at all. Experience has taught us it is simply not worth trying to manhandle heavy objects when you have an extremely helpful plant hire company on your doorstep.

With the TAS fully assembled and in place we are supposed to be back up to speed, but as with all new things there is a lot to learn, we are already finding certain simple features on the TAS make huge time savings. Operation is simple and registration is accurate, so it is now just a case of fine tuning our print / flood speeds and pressures. With 2 autos up and running we should now be able to proceed without any major changes for some time, allowing us to concentrate on quality and production. There are still many new things to try out in relation to water based inks and screen/stencil production.

We now hope to find time for improvements to the Advertees website, introducing some new products (for 2010) and special offers on T-shirt printing in particular. We should be writing more blog posts too, in an effort to keep you informed of any developments to our screen printing abilities. Two months without writing a post is way to long.