Hands and dwell
Every press cycle splits cleanly into two parts. There is the time the operator is doing something — squaring the garment on the platen, placing the transfer, closing, then opening, peeling and stacking. And there is the time the press is closed, during which the operator is not needed at all. On a single press these add together, because there is nowhere else for the operator to be.
Put a second press next to the first and the arithmetic changes. Total occupancy per cycle stays the same but it spreads across two machines, so the cycle time becomes whichever is larger: half the total occupancy, or the hands-on time that cannot be shared. As you add presses the first term keeps shrinking and the second does not, so the cycle converges on pure hands-on time and stops improving.
The saturation point
The number of presses worth having is the total cycle occupancy divided by the hands-on time, rounded up. With a long dwell and quick handling that number is high and a bank of presses genuinely pays. With a short dwell and slow handling it is often two, sometimes one, and buying a third press changes nothing at all. The calculator reports it directly and shows what the next press would actually save on the run in front of you.
What the page refuses to supply
There is no dwell time here, no temperature and no pressure. Those come with the transfer, vary by film and by fabric, and are the manufacturer's to state. The same goes for anything about fibre content, care labelling or flammability — those go to the garment manufacturer and the relevant agency, not to a calculator.
Related
The material side of a cut vinyl job is in the vinyl and decal material calculator, which covers roll nesting and weeding time. To compare pressing against screens on the same order, use the setup and break-even calculator. The multi-head version of this bottleneck question is the embroidery run time calculator.
Questions people ask
Where does a pre-press fit?
As one of the press cycles per garment. A quick pre-press to flatten and drive off moisture occupies the press and the operator exactly like any other cycle, just with a shorter dwell. If its dwell is much shorter than the main press, run the calculator twice and add the results rather than averaging, because a mixed dwell in a single cycle field will understate the long one.
Why does the cycle time not just divide by the press count?
Because the operator does not divide. Two presses can be closed simultaneously, but only one pair of hands can be loading a garment at a time, so the moment the hands-on work fills the whole cycle the presses start waiting instead. That threshold is what the saturation figure reports.
Should the re-press percentage include scrapped garments?
Include anything that goes through the press again, whether it eventually sells or ends up in the bin, because the press time is spent either way. If you also want the material cost of the scrapped ones, that is a separate calculation — this field only lengthens the schedule.
My handling time varies a lot between garment types. Which do I use?
Use a weighted average if the run is mixed, or split the run and calculate each part separately if the difference is large. Hooded garments, anything with a zip and anything that has to be aligned against a seam take considerably longer to place than a flat tee, and on a mixed order the average hides which half is eating the day.
Can I use this to decide whether to buy another press?
It will tell you how many hours another press saves on this run, and at your own rate what those hours are worth. It will not tell you whether to buy one, because that depends on how many runs a year look like this one, what else the operator would be doing with the recovered hours and what the press costs — none of which this page can see. It answers the time question and stops there.