This last week really felt like we were printing money.
We’ve been doing a few jobs a day, not enough to keep the press busy for more than a couple of hours at a time. On Wednesday we did a firmware update to the press, which dragged on for about four hours while we tweaked the settings. By Wednesday afternoon, we had a few jobs that were starting to pile up. I came in early on Thursday to start production, and then the work really started flowing.
We use two fusers on the press, and after Thursday we realized we really need three fusers to optimize the print sizes we’ve been doing, which would extend their production lifetime. The ideal setup is a fuser for envelopes; a fuser for 11×17 prints; and one for 12×18 prints. Fuser assemblies are relatively inexpensive at $3900, and they’re a one-time purchase. Maintenance on a fuser is just replacing parts as needed.
For the work we did, we ran a standard house stock; switched to static cling; did some oversized prints that were 39 inches long; switched back to the house stock; and then ran the press until 9pm that night.
In the early evening a friend of Andrew’s stopped by to see me. He’s an Indigo press operator for another company, and was looking for some additional work to do on the side since the shop he works at is slow. He spent about two hours with us, and in the end concluded that we didn’t need as a much a press operator as a babysitter for the press – it ran solid the whole time he was there, with dozens of small jobs queued up, never jamming once. In fact, from 7am until 9pm we operated at about a 93% productivity level with zero downtime other than to add more paper to the press.
On Friday, we had a guest down to see the press, and we ran envelopes as a test for him. We had some issues with the fuser at first, but once we adjusted the cam on the fuser, the envelopes started flying out the press like clockwork. We ran the fronts, flipped them over and did the flaps, and everything came out perfect.
After our guest left, we jumped back into production, running a 1600 sheet vinyl sticker job (bumper stickers); a variable print job; and some more static work. I finished up my evening again at 8pm – another long day of production.
So far, our work is coming in through word of mouth. Our web to print storefront is finished (backend) and now we just need to pretty it up before we launch the store. I’m expecting we’ll have that done pretty quick.
We’ll post numbers early next week for the last two weeks; and we’ll also have out video up soon. Andrew has to go buy a new computer to render the video, which should happen on Tuesday.
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