Start here: what belongs in Maintenance & Repairs

This is the board for keeping your gear alive — presses, printers, dryers, conveyor belts, and the pressers who run them. A press down in the middle of a rush is a five-alarm fire; the goal here is to stop the fire before it starts.

Where to put your attention:

• Preventive beats reactive, every time. A wiped-down press, lubed rails, and clean squeegees on a schedule cost minutes. A breakdown mid-run costs a deadline. Log the upkeep.
• Clean is a maintenance strategy. Ink buildup, dust in a print head, and gunk on a belt cause more "broken" machines than actual failures. Most DTG head issues are cleaning issues.
• Know your dryer's real temperature. Belt dryers drift. A cheap temp gun or donut probe catches a cure problem before a customer's wash does.
• Keep the common wear parts on the shelf. The pallet you always crack, the belt, the specific squeegee — a $20 spare on hand beats a two-day shipping wait.

How to ask a good question: name the machine (make/model), what it's doing (noise, error, symptom), and when it started. A photo or a short description of the sound/behavior on the thread helps us tell "quick fix" from "call the tech."