National Clothesline

am now five years removed from owning a plant, but I still find it easy to think like a plant owner. The plant owner searches for something that is hard to categorize neatly — a mysterious mixture of top quality, unbeatable service and an extra helping of profitability, each one being the “top” priority.

With goals as cosmic as that, it can’t be too hard to feel as though there will always be something to say when the subject of shirts comes up. I try to cover all of the aspects of shirt processing, but the actual pressing of shirts is a tough subject to cover because I have feared that it will come off as too general.

Everybody has different equipment of different ages that is set up in different ways. It is nearly useless to learn the idiosyncrasies of pressing on a Unipress if you own a Forenta. That important point neatly set aside, I do see the same types of pressing errors regardless of equipment layout, brand, configuration or age. Daily/weekly volume is also irrelevant.

During the next couple of months we will discuss the top five or six things that pressers do wrong while the owners and operators remain oblivious, perhaps busily focused on the big picture:

Figure 1. To dress a buck properly, the first step is to make sure that the shirt is even on the press from side to side. Use the sleeve seams as a guide.

Incorrectly clamping the collar in the collar clamp

This, by far, is the most common pressing error that I see. Remarkably, almost all pressers do this wrong and I’m not really sure why. More specifically, the presser treats every shirt as though it were the same size.

The collar block assembly — the thing that clamps the collar of the shirt to your body press — is one size, period. I’ve never measured it, but I can make an educated guess that it will measure approximately 15 inches in circumference.

In a way, you have to forget that the collar block assembly even exists. Many, many pressers make the mistake of wrapping the collar around the block, clamping it in place and then dealing with the rest of the shirt. This makes each shirt a bit of an adventure.

There is a far easier and more productive way, and it will ultimately yield a better pressed shirt with less touch-up. Let’s see if I can type this as easily as I can train it in person.

1. Dress the buck in the usual manner paying attention only to the shoulders seams and yoke seams.

2. Eyeball the sleeve seams. Depending on many factors, where these seams rest will vary greatly. They may be even with the outer limits of the buck, they may be outside of the bucks, or the buck may extend beyond the seams.

3. The key point here is to make sure that both sides of the shirt are a matched set, so to speak. The shirt must be even from side to side. You can’t have one seam on the buck and the other one hanging off the buck. This can potentially lead to all sorts of touch-up. See Figure 1.

4. The operator should now clamp the shirt in place, but do so without moving or distorting the carefully aligned shoulders of the shirt. Do this right and the rest is easy.

Figure 2. The folds in the fabric shown here happen when a presser forces too much overlap of the collar. This pulls the shoulders out of place. These folds can sometimes be flattened with the

hand or when the front of the shirt is pulled down, but not always.

Figure 3. The same shirt as Figure 2, but now it has not been overlapped too much. The result is a shirt that will press flawlessly. The bonus is that it is just as easy, or easier to do it right.

What pressers do wrong is that they clamp the shirt the same way regardless of the size or cut of the shirt. Doing this will move the shoulders of the shirt and create horizontal wrinkles in the area around the collar bone, or the operator will need to finagle the shirt in some way so as to remove these wrinkles, effectively slowing down productivity.

In fact, the amount that one side of the shirt overlaps the other side — if there is any overlap at all — will vary greatly depending on the size of the shirt. Seems to me that many pressers believe the collar needs to be overlapped always.

Using a collar cone

It is senseless to have one of these if it’s used wrong, and about eight times out of ten, it is used wrong.

Look at the photos that follow. In order to get the intended benefit of a collar cone, the collar needs to be folded perfectly at the Adam’s apple area. If it’s improperly folded, you will cure the collar in precisely the manner that you wish to avoid. This is a major faux pas.

The collar cone, in spite of its design, should never have hangers in it. The hangers will keep the shirt from making taunt and uniform contact with the cone itself. Don’t waste your time with a cone that isn’t heated.

Figure 5. This is the same shirt, but this time no attention was paid to folding of the collar. This collar will cure in this manner and will never look right. It takes very little effort to fold a collar correctly, but attention must be paid.

Figure 4. It is obvious here that the collar was properly folded. Notice how there is no “roll” in the

collar band and how crisply folded the collar is.

Lack of rhythm

This may not sound like a quality-related issue, but I believe that it is. Working in a rhythmic, methodic and predictable manner leads to better quality shirts because the presser is more relaxed, not harried and hurried.

There are so many types of shirt units out there today that it is hard to describe a method that will make sense to you, personally. But I think that I can generalize in a way that will still make my point: Always have a shirt on every press, plus one waiting in queue. Make sense?

Translated into a real life situation: picture a single buck shirt unit with a shirt on every “station.” That is, a shirt on the collar cone curing, another shirt on the buck on the body press, another on the hook waiting to be pressed and one each on the collar and cuff press and on the sleever.

Got the picture? Remember the stations: collar cone, body press, hook, collar and cuff, sleever and damp box. Now to have rhythm, the presser always follows this order:

1. Unload the collar cone.

2. Unload the body press. Take that shirt and…

3. Re-load the collar cone,

4. Take the shirt off the hook and dress the body press.

5. Take the shirt off the collar and cuff press and place it on the hook (that is, re-load the hook).

6. Unload the sleever. Take that shirt and…

7. Re-load the collar machine.

8. Reload the sleever with a new shirt from the damp box.

By now, the shirt on the collar cone has cured for long enough and the body press is finished pressing. The operator now begins again at step one. It is easy and stressless and leads to doing a better job. Having a good steady rhythm means that your presser will always do things this way. Watch your presser’s routine. Can you predict exactly what he or she will do next?

Next month, more pressing tips.

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

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 web sites located at: www.tailwindshirts.com and www.dondesrosiers.com