1 Printer, 2 Heat Presses?

My experience is just the opposite.

Typically...the print time is longer than the dwell time of the heat press unless you are doing only a single pass on a pocket design or something like that.

But that is for my T Jet II so there may be newer models out there with faster print speeds that may make two heat presses more viable.

Yeah you should have no problem with the printer printing faster than the heat press can cure. If you do, let me know, I'd be really interested in that printer!

If you purchase the HM-1 and are printing light colored shirts at 720 dpi, you will absolutely find that press time is greater than print time, especially if printing smaller designs (like 10 x 6 or 8 x 8). Print speed at this resolution is about 50 seconds for a 11 x 14 print, cure time is 90-120 seconda - depending on your ink set.

Hope this helps.

I just purchased a second heat press & let me tell you it really really helps. Like Don mentioned when printing light colored shirts, two heat presses really comes in handy. Also it helps when doing dark color shirts, it used to take me about an hour to pretreat around 50 shirts on one side then start the printing process, now I pretreat a few shirts set them to print continuously on my printer and pretreat, heat press pretreated shirts, print and cure printed shirts all at the same time. Before I had to do one thing at a time because the heat press was busy with one shirt.

mgarcia16 said:

I just purchased a second heat press & let me tell you it really really helps. Like Don mentioned when printing light colored shirts, two heat presses really comes in handy. Also it helps when doing dark color shirts, it used to take me about an hour to pretreat around 50 shirts on one side then start the printing process, now I pretreat a few shirts set them to print continuously on my printer and pretreat, heat press pretreated shirts, print and cure printed shirts all at the same time. Before I had to do one thing at a time because the heat press was busy with one shirt.

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Mario...excellent point!

That aspect got by me....

Yes...having two heat pressess defintely helped me when printing on pretreated shirts allowing me to do as you did...pretreat shirts while printing others.

Good catch....

I have 3 heat presses. I for pretreat only. 2 for drying. especially pocket logos you can put them out way faster than they will dry. If you run evrything smoothly you can have all on the go at once. Just timing them all correctly is the hardest and if you have a bad hair day it can become a bit of a balls up. Of which I do have bad hair days or at least wahts left of my hair

adrenaline said:

I have 3 heat presses. I for pretreat only. 2 for drying. especially pocket logos you can put them out way faster than they will dry. If you run evrything smoothly you can have all on the go at once. Just timing them all correctly is the hardest and if you have a bad hair day it can become a bit of a balls up. Of which I do have bad hair days or at least wahts left of my hair

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LOL..yeah! You can certainly run yourself ragged and screw yourself into the ground if your having an off day.

Yeah mate I think I try too bite of more than I can chew. Some days I have 4 printers going all at once (DTG and Disub) and then it becomes fun a games, alarms going of everywhere and my head spinning around. I have a 9 yo daughter and she can know do all the stubby holder from out of the printer (disub) to pressed and put together. She does really well and also does all the orders up into boxes. every day when she comes home from school she boxes up on average 12 cartoons of orders and lables them etc ready to post. Cheap labour "no help no food" LOL. Then she helps with the stubby holders and pressing and folding shirts. I actually got all of this for the wife as she was sick of the cleaning business (9 years of it) and looking after 12 staff. Guess what? she has not shown 1oz of interest in the printing side at all.

I definately think if I were running a second heat press it would speed things up for me I have the HM1 and I often find myself sitting waiting for the heat press. I would say the majority of my items are done printing before done curing. I would run two heat presses but my house was built in 1920 and my lights already blink from the power the one heat press takes haha Otherwise I would definately add another as I could see it help me alot.

Electricity is definitely a consideration in some buildings as each heat press does draw a bit of power- we had a separate line run for the heat press- didn't cost much at all. Now if we had to upgrade the whole main box- we had bids between $1000-$1500. If we added a second heat press we'd be close to needing to do that.

There have been many times when a second heat press would have sped up production quite a bit. Our ink cures quite fast - 60 seconds, but when doing four prints per pass on our Flexi we still fall behind and have to wait a lot with one heat press.

Gee, I run a Spa, 2 air con units and 3 heat presses plus the rest of the house. Our power bill is always expensive but we have had no power probs at all. I run all the printing gear through UPS and PC's. Heat press through 15amp Plugs and Spa through 25amp and A/c units 25amp. All wired in properly. I just hope we have no issues or the sparky will know about it.