National Clothesline

During the end of a recent seminar, I was asked several specific questions that helped me to understand how a drycleaner in the shirt business thinks.

I suppose that this dry-cleaner traveled to a “shirt seminar” and hoped to get all of his questions answered. I’ll bet that he expected to have all of those “mysteries” solved. I was asked — at one singular seminar — all of these questions:

When do I change the pads and covers?

What should the timer setting be on a sleeve press?

How do I press the perfect shirt?

How can I avoid touch-up?

What should be the setting for the air pressure regulator?

At what steam pressure should my boiler be?

These are questions that do not have definitive answers. And there aren’t going to be any. But the drycleaner who dabbles in the shirt business wants some easy answers. The heady stuff is supposed to be reserved for the revenue-generating drycleaning. There is a subconscious thought that the shirts aren’t supposed to generate more mysteries than profit. But they do.

And, who knows, maybe they always will.

I certainly do deduce that these queries were from folks who honestly didn’t believe that they had the answers. Frankly, I wonder why they don’t know, and I wonder why they think that I would. Perhaps they think that I am foolhardy enough to make up some sort of an intelligent sounding answer; subscribing to the “if you can’t dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with bull” school of thought. You’re asking the wrong guy if you expect something like that.

Let me assure you that I think these questions are very good ones. It’s just that the answers are not neat, compact and to the point. They are vague and conditional and may vary from plant to plant and may not even be the same from one time of the year to another in the same plant.

I have an idea. Let’s have a multiple choice quiz. You won’t have to wait until next month or turn this publication upside down for the answers. They will follow. When you see the right answer, I bet that you’ll know it’s the right answer, but promise not to be disappointed. Here we go:

When do I change the pads and covers?

A. When I feel like it.

B. When the bag(s) have holes in them or the cover has worn through.

C. Every 10,000 shirts.

D. Every fourth Saturday

E. When press quality deteriorates in a certain way that is clearly not operator error, but rather obvious indications of pads that are spent such as seam impressions or fabric that is less than fully dry.

The correct answer is E.

B is a common indicator, but quite wrong. If you wait until the bags are porous, you have been doing below par pressing and either made up for it by excessive touch-up or allowed poor quality to get to customers. Both are bad moves, of course.

Furthermore, quality will deteriorate at least as much when the pads are worn as when the covers (or bags) are obviously no good. Generally the pads will expire sooner than the covers or bags and the only visual indicator will be the resulting shirts, not the product itself.

It is a good idea to write the number of shirts that the machine counter reads with a laundry marker, as well as the date, on an area of the new cover that the steam chest will never touch (like the very bottom near the draw string). This will accomplish a couple of things.

It will establish an idea of when the pads need to be in stock and when the pads are near the end of their life by allowing you to guess-timate that your pads and covers last, say, 15,000 shirts. This is important because it may happen that the bags on a new set of pads and covers are defective and you will want to be able to tell your supplier, with authority, that this set of covers only lasted 5,109 shirts rather than the usual 15,000.

Furthermore, by accumulating this data, you will be capable of comparing individual brands of pads and covers. Those that have some of this historical data have come up with a hard schedule, using time (answer D) or number of shirts (answer C) as a signal.

Once you have established the correct time or volume number that works for you at your plant, with your equipment, this may be right for you and is far, far better than waiting for poor quality to tell you about the inevitable. It may be that 10,000 shirts, or every four weeks, just happens to be right for you, but it will not be correct for everyone, or anyone, else.

What should the timer setting be on a sleeve press?

A. Set the timer according to the manufacturer’s recommendation.

B. 15 seconds.

C. 20 seconds.

D. 5 seconds more than the factory recommended setting.

E. Just long enough to fully dry the sleeve, but not so long that the operator has to wait for the sleeve press to release or so long that the pad’s life is shortened.

The correct answer is E.

Setting the timer to factory specs sounds correct but it’s nothing more than a guideline. The factory doesn’t know about the moisture content of the shirts that you press at your plant, or how long in advance they are washed, or how quickly or slowly, your pressers press. I am often asked for a hard number, but any such answer is inherently flawed.

It takes a little bit of research to find out what is right for you. Let’s say that you determine that 16 is right for you. At 16 seconds, the shirts are crispy dry and the presser never needs to wait for the machine. Ten days later, the shirt sleeves are damp.

Was your research wrong? I suppose that it could be, but let’s assume that it isn’t. Knowing that a sleeve will dry in 16 seconds at your plant with your equipment, you learn that there is a problem. The pads need to be replaced, perhaps? Are the shirts too wet?

If so, why? There are many ways for your shirts to be too wet. Extract belt slipping? Water valve stuck open? Washer drain restricted? Maybe it’s the steam pressure. Has the boiler shut down via the low water cut-off switch? Is there a clogged steam trap?

How do I press the perfect shirt?

A. Practice.

B. By not looking for mistakes.

C. By listening to customer complaints.

D. By replacing my equipment.

E. What’s a perfect shirt?

This is kind of a silly question to ask a speaker at a seminar, don’t you think? In fact, I can not imagine a sensible answer to this question. What could one possibly expect as the correct answer?

If you answered “A”, you probably have a firm grasp on reality. That reality being that the “perfect” shirt is subjective and not a brass ring. Practice makes perfect, I suppose, but show me a “perfect” shirt and I can look hard enough to find three things “wrong” with it. Although none of these are likely to be indicative of a poor press job, they will surely challenge Webster’s definition of “perfect.”

If you answered “B”, you are probably just kidding (OK, hopefully, you’re just kidding). If you wait for customer complaints to raise your standards, well, you really need to be more pro-active. (I’m being gentle.)

While some people surely are in need of new equipment, it is never a sure way fix a quality problem. Make sure that you talk to several people who do not sell equipment about the quality of your shirts before you jingle up for replacement equipment.

How can I avoid touch-up?

A. By training your pressers.

B. By buying the same shirt unit that does perfect shirts at the trade show.

C. By sending out whatever comes off the shirt unit.

D. By accepting only size 15 poly/cotton oxfords from your customers.

E. When bagging up an order of shirts, put the best looking shirt in the front of the order and the shirts that actually need touch-up behind them.

Trick question. You can’t avoid touch-up if you want to do a good job, so why would you want to?

Training your pressers will not prevent touch-up because touch-up exists so that parts of the shirts that your equipment is incapable to doing properly get taken care of. The pressers’ abilities should not affect the number of touch-ups.

Yes, I know, when Betty presses, you have 10 percent touch-up, but when she doesn’t come in and Mary presses, you have 25 percent touch-ups. This is a by-product of substandard supervision and training. This tells me that the touch-ups that are done when Betty presses are things that the equipment is incapable of (really big, or really small shirts for instance), while most of Mary’s touch-ups are “illegal” touch-up because they are really operator errors.

Here, A.) training your pressers, is appropriate to minimize pressing errors, but not to avoid them completely.

If you think that buying the unit that you see at the convention doing perfect shirts will avoid touch-ups, you will be disappointed. To be fair, the new units are better at doing a wide range of sizes than any of the older ones — but eliminate? Avoid? Forget it. I challenge any manufacturer to show me a unit that does every shirt perfectly.

The correct answer here is “C”, just send anything and everything out right off the unit without regard for quality and you will avoid touch-ups. Don’t say I didn’t warn you, though. You just may be avoiding any shot at a profit, too.

What should be the setting for the air pressure regulator?

A. 60 psi.

B. 80 psi.

C. 80-100 psi.

D. This depends on your brand and type of equipment.

E. This depends on your brand and type of equipment but also the accuracy of the gauge should never be taken for granted.

Setting the regulator to, say 80 psi, may give you a false sense of security if you haven’t made yourself quite certain that the gauge, as well as the regulator, are in perfect working order. Assuming that they are not working properly may seem like the ultimate in pessimism, but since proper air pressure is so important, there is no sense in leaving this to chance.

Consider that the design of many shirt units has the regulator and the gauge exposed outside of the cabinet at ankle height where it can easily be kicked or bumped by a passing laundry cart. Keep a brand new one in stock and swap it out with one that is in service after noting the reading on that gauge. Mark the used one as good and store it. Discard an inaccurate one.

OK, this is a trick question, but I sure hope that everyone realizes that this is the correct answer.

At what steam pressure should my boiler be?

A. 80 psi.

B. 90 psi.

C. 100 psi.

D. 120 psi.

E. Impossible to determine without more information.

The correct answer is E. Many make the mistake of reading the name plate on their equipment and then setting the boiler at that pressure. In nearly every installation, the recommended steam pressure setting in the equipment handbook has distinct value as far as boiler pressure: Your boiler setting must definitely not be that low. That is its value.

The recommended steam pressure at the equipment is not your boiler setting. There are a variety of factors that will determine what to set your boiler at. Most have to do with the piping. How far apart are the shirt unit and the boiler? Is the steam inlet trapped? What is the diameter of the header?

Make sure that you have equipment that will properly measure head temperature. (Tip: The laser testers do not give accurate reading on shiny surfaces) When you have 344 degrees (for 100 PSI) at the machine, your boiler pressure does not need to be increased.

Don Desrosiers married

A. Matilda on February 30.

B. Bertha on October 3.

C. Janet on August 16.

D. His car on September 1.

E. All of the above

The correct answer is C. <wink>

“If you do what you’ve always done, you’ll get what you’ve always got”



						What’s the right answer for you?
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