Went to the NBM show in Austin

alexm1984 · March 27th, 2011, 03:13 PM

I spent Saturday at the NBM show in Austin and go to see some cool stuff. I've only been to the ISS Fort Worth show and this show was much smaller than that. And I've heard the fort worth show is small compared to other shows so I guess this was a mini show. There was only one automatic on the floor and it was an 8 color diamondback, all air. I watched it run for about 15 minutes and watched them print a few shirts. The shirts looked really good and it was setup by Graphic Elephants I think. They had a chart setup on the press showing all the settings and mesh counts they used for the job. That was cool to see exactly how they had it set up. They even included EOM ratio which I don't have much knowledge about.

I got to meet and talk with a lot of good people. I shook hands with several well known guys in the industry. Vastex had a booth and I really like their press. I was leaning towards the anatol or antec legend for my manual press but I don't see how any of them could be better than the vastex. It was built like a tank but it was also refined and very easy to print on.

I spent some time at all of the screen printing supplier booths and just talked shop with as many people as I could. I saw a ton of engraving machines and products that when I open my own business, I'll be offering engraving as well. Some of the things you can do with the engraving machines is awesome. And from what I was told, the markup is very high, and the labor involved in doing awards and other engraving products is way less than screen printing.

There was a bunch of embroidery machines to look at but I dont' know crap about embroidery so I didn't stop and talk at those booths.

I learned a lot, talked to a few really good printers and left there much more prepared to go out on my own. I hope the show was good enough for everyone so that they bring another one into town in the future. I wish there was more autos thre but I guess it's just too expensive for them to bring in that kind of machinery. I had an opportunity to visit a shop that a few guys were going to after the show and see an RPM. I met Alan (srimonogramming) and a few guys were going with him up to his shop but I had to get back to San Antonio and couldn't go that far in the other direction.

THat's my little review of the show, overall I think it was worth every penny of the $10 entry fee. I wish it would have been bigger but I don' t thing they could have put much more stuff on the floor. I think that convention center is much smaller than the fort worth center. It was a very small show but I benefited from going and enjoyed it very much.