What can printers do to speed up production with their manual press?

Stage all orders with screens, inks, and garments in mind.

Use pneumatic clamps, so screens don’t have to be manually tightened.

Carefully check all screens for errors to avoid press downtime.

Use properly adjusted inks in regards to viscosity, so they are not too thick to manually pull but still have good opacity.

Make sure labor processes are efficient and spelled out, so there are no on-press questions about order details during set up and production. One order should flow right after another.

Have plenty of clean squeegees on hand so that your manual press operator doesn’t have to clean them in-between jobs. If you are using a small color palette, you can have squeegees assigned to each color to minimize daily cleaning.

—The M&R Companies