Sankosha has been pressing the sleeve pleats on shirts for perhaps a decade and now many manufacturers have taken the hint.That was the top innovation at the Clean Show in my view.I sure hope that my personal drycleaner gets a new machine that presses the sleeve pleats on my shirts.I feel a bit Neanderthalwearing a shirt that doesn’t have perfect sleeve pleats now.Like software and so many other things, someone comes up with a basic idea, a version 1.0, if you will, and then others build on the basic concept.There were several new machines that featured new ways to press the sleeve pleats but Unipress went about it in a most unique way.The steam head that does the actual pressing is not flat.It is folded at a near 90 degree angle which means that the pleats get pressed plus the sleeve gusset gets a full press! (Patent Pending) You know that really thick part of a shirt at the elbow-end of the sleeve gusset?That part of the shirt gets pressed and nearly 100% dry!This, on a blown-sleeve unit!So, Unipress is phasing out their NT line and replacing it with the AP line (an acronym for “automatic pleater”).
Unipress didn’t stop with the AP line.They introduced a product (meaning, not a pressing machine) that I will tell you about in my upcoming column about new products for shirt launderers and they introduced a quad collar & cuff machine much like the Japanese have been making for a few decades.This is a great solution for those that need high production and top quality.Get a quad collar machine (model Q4T) for $13,000 – far less than 2 conventional collar/cuff presses – and a pair of AP2 double-buck body presses and you can easily do 200 quality shirts per hour with 3 operators.Sound familiar?
Unipress also introduced something that they call “e-force” on their entire line of collar and cuff presses.It works with the special spring board that replaces the traditional steel mesh on Unipress’ collar machines.The E-force is an ingenious way to slightly stretch the collar a split-second before it gets pressed.This is done in a passive way, rather than with moving parts.The curvature of the steam chest is of a slightly tighter radius than that of the buck which means that it contacts the edges of the shirt collar a micro-second before the rest of the collar.This passively stretches the collar.
