National Clothesline

If you are among those who missed the Clean Show last month, I am here to tell you that you are officially below the learning curve. Yes, I know that many would like to go but can’t. I was in that boat for a few years. If you’re in the group that doesn’t care what the show has to offer, I think that you’ll find that you probably should care. If you just can’t go for business or personal reasons (again, I can sympathize) I am going to try to get you in the loop as far as shirt equipment goes.

It was a great show here in this fascinating city we call Las Vegas (but will they ever finish building it?) We are going to take a virtual tour of the new and improved shirt pressing equipment at Clean 2003. I think that you’ll be impressed. I sure was but I’m happy that I am not in the market for a shirt unit. I’d have a heck of a time making a decision.

It happens that in February and in May I wrote about shirt units. Once I compared pressed sleeves and blown sleeves and in May I talked about the things that I liked among a sampling of the units that are available. In both columns, I complained about a few things that I don’t like too. Let’s see if any of those things were addressed.

Ajax

Jeff Dunn of Alliance Laundry Machinery, the company that owns Ajax, showed me their new “Legacy” shirt machine. Now, before I tell you about the Legacy, I must tell you that I’ve wondered what it like to be in Ajax’s shoes. As I mentioned in May, their design is tried and true. It has been around for a long time. If it ain’t broke, it don’t need fixin’.

I understand that, but is innovation the sacrifice? What do you do? Do you wake up and find yourself decades behind the times? Hmmm.

Well, in spite of the successes and the endurance of the Classic Ajax double buck, there have been, of course, an accumulation of minor complaints about the equipment. Perhaps “customer feedback” is a better choice of words. I’ve been one of the complainers. All products have some aspects that can be improved and comments and complaints from users are the manufacturers’ best friend.

The Legacy is the product that fixes all of the issues that customers have been complaining about for years. The unit looks very familiar but is actually quite different. It is a successful attempt at remaining “tried and true” while still being innovative. The highlights:

• All of the air tubes are now color-coded to make diagnostics easy.

• All of the air valves (21 of them) are located together in one control panel. They all look the same, too, appearing to be interchangeable. (although I suspect that they are not).

• The buttons used to send the bucks in are completely re-designed and seem to me to be an engineering marvel. They are sturdy, good-looking, aluminum rather than plastic and they ‘click’ when you press them as though they were electric but indeed are 100 percent pneumatic.

• The cabinet is now painted with chip-resistant paint to keep the unit looking good for a long period of time.

• The sleever gets an upgrade, too. The sleeves will no longer ‘ride up’ when the air bags are inflated thanks to the device between the sleeves that pulls down slightly just before the heads close to pull the sleeves taunt.

• I pressed a few shirts on this unit and thought that it was quite easy to do an excellent shirt.

FujiStar

How about a single-buck unit, one operator and 100 shirts per hour?

FujiStar’s new double collar and cuff press makes it happen. This is also an excellent choice if you have a conventional double buck unit and want two collar and cuff machines but have a space issue.

The machine works by having a head and buck that is wide (or is it deep?) enough to allow two shirts on it at one time. One shirt is placed in the usual way and the other on the back of the buck.

Although I didn’t check the specs, I have a strong suspicion that you’ll use measurably less utilities with this unit, not to mention saving about 12 square feet of space. The double body press has been upgraded with an array of (rather attractive) safety guards. I was invited to press shirts on that unit for an hour. Myself and two other operators pressed over 300 shirts with ease, and no one could find a flaw on a single one!

Hoffman

Hoffman has introduced its new rotary double body press. It looks rather familiar but it was very easy to do a good job. I can’t be sure if it is the strong vacuum that makes it so easy to do a great shirt, but the vacuum is noticeably stronger than on other units.

I made it a point to press on every shirt unit that I was shown. It doesn’t matter much to me if the salesperson or the professional pressers can do a good job. What does matter is if the procedures can be easily communicated. I expected to be good at doing a very good quality shirt with less than five minutes training.

I accomplished this on every unit. If you’re in need of a conventional three-piece unit, consider that Hoffman’s biggest upgrade was with their sleeve press. They deserve a lot of credit for being innovative with a machine that doesn’t at first seem to need any tweaks.

The operator’s first steps are familiar, but after the cuffs have been clipped into place, the presser actuates a small rubber knob at the base of the inside of the buck — the shoulder of the shirt — that prevents the shirt from creeping up and causing a wrinkle at the top of the shoulder.

There’s more. When the bucks are sent in, the heads pause before closing. This allows time for a small press head to sneak in between the steam chests and press in the sleeve pleat!

This must be the most advanced sleeve press in the world!

Sankosha

Sankosha is now importing a much improved version of a collar and cuff press that I saw in Japan a couple of years ago. The press looks familiar, but under the covers lies the neatest innovation I’ve seen in collar and cuff presses. And it happens to address my pet peeve — creases in the cuffs.

The cuff bucks are each made of two parts. I’ll call them the base and the crown. The press is dressed in the usual manner. When the head is closed, the magic happens passively. The design of the three parts — the base, the crown and the head — automatically stretches the cuffs slightly to produce a wrinkle-free finish. This happens because the base of the buck isn’t aligned with the contour of the head until it is forced down by the head.

No switches, no clamps, no hold-downs, no devices, but a heaping helping of pure genius.

Unipress

Twelve months ago, at a hotel lounge in Atlantic City, Gary Johnson and I were having a conversation about his company’s wildly successful CRD rotary body press. I told him how I hated the pinched sleeves. The design of the sleeve holders made it necessary to pinch the sleeves closed right near where the sleeves and cuff meet.

As I said in a column a few months later, on a starched, oxford shirt, the resulting pinch is ugly. Gary lamented that they had to have a way to close off the sleeves in order to pressurize them. I remember saying; “I want the cuffs to be rounded. Stick a baseball in the cuff if you have to and make a rounded clamp.”

Well, Unipress listens to customers. There is no baseball in the cuff, but an ingenious device that replaces the fork used on the previous models. As an added bonus the short sleeve device is the best I’ve seen and is intergrated into the device. It will be easier to do a better job with this highly recommended option.

The new rounded clamp is easier to use correctly than the old fork device. Operators tended to sloppily fold the cuff and jam it in between the fingers. This often resulted in a sloppy, if not hideous, press job.

The extra bonus features add to its appeal: The cuffs are released from the mechanism when the press cycle ends. This saves the operator from having to release the sleeves later.

Furthermore, the short sleeve gadgets allow the presser to fine-tune the positioning of the sleeve seam before pressing takes place. The result is literally a perfectly pressed short sleeve on a blown sleeve unit. Nothing short of amazing.

A byproduct of this upgrade was the beefing up of the arms themselves. This needed attention. The dampening of the movement of these arms with small amounts of air pressure keeps the weight of the arms from pulling on the back of the shirt, making it easy to do a great job.

All these tweaks amount to a heck of an improvement to all of Unipress’ blown sleeve units.

If your volume is more geared to the Suzi-type shirt units, there was innovation there, too.

Fimas, Hi-Steam

John Tipps of Clean Concepts introduced a completely new unit by Fimas that has rounded cuff clamps similar to Unipress’. But the similarity ends there. The unit is operated by a single footswitch making it simple to operate. After the equipment begins its pressing cycle, the presser may fine-tune the position of the sleeve with a joy stick which effectively eliminates any wrinkles in the underarms!

Before the cycle concludes, the hot air is replaced with cold air to cool the shirt and thereby prevent wrinkles while removing the shirt from the form. Hi-Steam introduced a similar unit that boasts ease of training as a main feature. This is important because it is dangerous to have an unqualified presser near a press. Danger lurks around every corner. The Hi-Steam claims that this unit can do anything from a size 4 blouse to a size 20 shirt. No small feat.

So which does the best job? They all do an outstanding job. In fact, I pressed at least a couple of shirts — perfectly — on every one of these units with less than five minutes of training. I sure am glad that I don’t need to buy a shirt unit. How could I pick among these gems?

Donald Desrosiers has been in the shirt laundering business since 1978 and is a work-flow systems engineer who provides services to shirt launderers through Tailwind Shirt Systems, 867 Spencer St., Fall River, MA. He can be reached by phone at (508) 965-3163 or by e-mail at tailwind1@comcast.net and he has a web sites located at: www.tailwindshirts.com and www.dondesrosiers.com