Screen Printers Open - A Forum for Screen Printing and Embroidery

What's the most important things to look out for when buying a used automatic press? I ran into a few deals lately, the machines looked good but that could be mostly cosmetic. Any great tips on what might indicate a bad machine without excessive testing?

Th most important thing when buying any piece of equipment actually is done before you even look at equipment new or used. That is understand your needs!!!

Define exactly what you need and how much you can afford to pay for it!!

Do you do long runs or do you have lots of short run work. Is it 2 color or do you need lot of flashing?

Regarding deals. A deal is only a deal if it does what you need it to do. Before buying, you need to understand exactly what the condition of the machine is or you shouldn't buy it. If you do not know how to check a machine out, hire someone that does. There are plenty of Tech's out there that would be happy to go inspect a machine for you. It might cost you a couple of hundred but it may just save your butt.

The last thing you should be swayed by is does it have all the bells and whistles. A perfect example is todays cell phone. Most cell phone have far more features than most people will ever think about using. You primary concerns should be the ability of the machine to produce shirts at the rate of ??shirts per hour reliably. Will this machine hold registration for 100 shirts or 1000 shirts or am I going to be chasing it all over the map. Will it produce saleable product for your market? Different markets have different criteria for acceptable.

Finally, after considering if it meets your needs today the next question should be, will it meet my needs tomorrow. Unless your looking at this machine just to help ease a production backlog, you need to consider your future growth otherwise in six months or a year you'll be kicking yourself that you didn't buy the 8 color/ 10 station machine instead of the 6 color you bought.

I would hire someone who is fairly knowledgeable with autos to check it out with you, or for you, if you are not all that familiar with them. A service tech would be a good idea but not absolutely necessary. There are many of us out here that know autos well enough to do a thorough inspection. Since you are buying used, you might be able to afford some features that if you were buying new, you wouldn't be able to afford. Some features are worth having and some aren't. It would be difficult to go through all of those with you on a forum but if you have any feature specific questions we could give you some insight on those.

Looking for issues that a press might have is like inspecting a used car. The most important thing to look for would be if it holds registration. That would require you setting up a multi-colored job and looking at each pallet to see if there are any inconsistencies. As the press indexes and the table moves up and down, look for how smooth the press operates. Same goes for each print head. See if you can find most of the grease fittings and if you can tell if they have seen a grease gun recently. You can tell by the looks of one if it does or doesn't get greased regularly.

There are only a few manufacturers that I would stay away from as far as used machines go and I wouldn't consider anything older than mid 90's on any press except for the American Centurian. There may be other exceptions to that as well, but that's a good place to start.

Look for a servo driven indexer and AC print heads as far as major features go. Air indexers and air operated print heads are fine, but if you have a choice in the matter, choose electric. A lot of the other features will come down to personal preference. I chose a press with every feature you could get without really knowing how it would affect day to day printing. Turns out I use every feature on our press. I know some printers would have no need for some of the things on our press, but most features, when used properly will save time.

Not to put any pressure on you , just reminding you as to how important this process is. The press you choose could make or break you, so be diligent and educate yourself to the fullest. Good luck and keep us posted, we like hearing how it all goes.

My two cents. I started looking about a year before I bought my auto. If you can limit your search to 100 or so miles from your location, this will cut down on moving cost, and the expense of traveling to look at different machines. As for trying to justify if your volume is big enough to add an auto, I bought mine to save the old shoulders, the manual printing was wearing me out. If you have an auto the volume will come.

That is great advice, now lets apply it this situation....

Screen Demon, if someone who's name starts with and R and ends in obert Barnes tries to sell you a machine, run.