Howdy howdy!
We here at Nakatomi have some VERY exciting news, even if our customers might not EVER know the difference!
We’ve just recently (Jan 1st) moved all our operations from out of Tim Doyle’s ever-shrinking house into a new space that will suit our needs for years to come!
Our new address is 2101 Airport Blvd here in Austin, TX- inside the AJL advertising building (pictured above)!
Tim Doyle has had a working relationship with AJL that goes back 6 years now, and the kind folks there have been MORE than accommodating in helping us set up shop and to lend us their decades of experience in the screen printing industry! We had been looking for a space for MONTHS, and just happened to pop in to AJL one day to see if they had any ideas on spaces, and they had JUST had a tenant cut down on the space they needed in their shop. It was an amazing stroke of luck, and we couldn’t be happier!
In the middle of last year, we realized we were rapidly outgrowing Tim Doyle’s garage workshop and had even taken over his front room for all packing and shipping. With the arrival of the Doyle’s 2nd child last September, we KNEW our time there was at an end. (Babies are small, but dang they take up a lot of space!)
Back in the Summer of ’09, Doyle and Clint Wilson practically scratch built an ENTIRE silkscreen shop in the one-car garage at Tim’s place, and EVERY print that came through Nakatomi from that point forward was printed in that crucible of awesomeness. You can read all about the build-out of that much loved space HERE.
Our new shop is conveniently just 5 minutes up the road from where we were, and located right next door to a tasty, tasty seafood vendor. (Fish on the CHEAP!)
Let’s take a look around the new space, eh?
On the ground floor of AJL, through these plain doors you’ll find our shop! What’s exciting about doors? Well, now that we’re a climate controlled room within a larger room, we’ll be weather-proof, in that humidity will no longer be a concern! If you’re a printer, you know what we’re talking about! If you look closely, you’ll see Sean and Zane, the Nakatomi printers, in no way threatening to stab me while I’m taking pictures.
This is a wide photo of the shop as we were still setting it all up- but the best thing about this all? SPACE. We’ve got almost 900 sq feet now, as compared to the 350 we were working out of before. Living the dream, my friends.
Here’s Doyle in front of the racks we have for inks now! Nice and clean! We threw out our legion of pre-mixed bottles from old jobs, starting fresh! Also, you can see Tim getting the respect of his employees on the right. All this modular furniture, and even the walls themselves were provided by AJL, as they just have a ton of this stuff sitting around. What a swell bunch of people!
This is the BIGGEST print rack I’ve ever seen. EVER. This beauty came from a sign shop that was going out of business here in town, and they were just DUMPING their equipment at crazy prices. This rack would retail around $5K new- we picked it up for $100 flat. Crazy. AND- we needed this thing so we can print 24×36 prints!
We got the hot tip about all this great equipment getting cleared out from the ever-friendly Satch Grimley- a killer printer in his own right.
TOOBS! I know, I know- to you guys, this is no big deal- but to US…wow. Before, we had to store our boxes of tubes on the front porch or in a storage unit on the side of the house…now? It’s RIGHT THERE. Right next to the packing table. This is heaven. Brown, Craft, Telescoping Heaven. AND- we can be as freaking LOUD as we want. No newborns to accidentally wake up! Stupid babies, with your stupid little cute faces.
Look at those freaking flatfiles!
From the same score that we got the rack above from, comes this beautiful custom wooden testimony to excellence in cabinetry. All for the low low price of – $100. It seriously reaches to the ceiling. We had to take out part of the tiles up there to stand it up. That is CRAZY. I feel like printing a bunch of stuff just to fill it up.
That’s one of our two new Auto-presses- a BIG ASS M&R Eclipse. This beauty is what we’ll be printing on mostly.
That is Doyle ‘licking’ the press to claim it as his own. He says he’s licking it, but we’re pretty sure he’s getting a little more intimate with the machinery. We’re sorry you had to see this.
This machine is from ’94, and works like it just rolled off the assembly line. Which is good, as if we HAD bought one of these new, it would have run us something like 25-30K, easy (according to what I can find on-line). From that same shop-closing we got the racks and flatfiles, we got this press for a crazy steal at a mere $1500.
Our trusty staff remains the same, however- Sean and Zane do all the printing, packing and shipping, leaving Doyle to do the drawing and napping.
One of the exciting parts of all this is that we’ll soon be opening up for outside commercial printing jobs- we’ve been printing off and on for years for artists like Jon Smith, Olly Moss (A Life Well Wasted series), Josh Budich, Russ Moore, and many, many more, but it was always on a DL status- if you were a buddy we’d do it for you, but we didn’t advertise. NOW- if you’re an artist and want to quality and attention to detail that Nakatomi puts into all their prints, you’ll be able to get on the schedule and sit back and let us rock the Squeegee for you! With all this new equipment, all our prints are going to be better, sharper, and tighter than before! AND- we’re printing WAY faster as well! (Hooray for automation!)
We’ll have an announcement when the new printing site goes live, but if you’ve had something printed from us before, hit us up to get in early, eh?
We’ll leave you with this picture of our founder, Tim Doyle, emerging from our darkroom/ screen storage-
That ladies and gentlemen, is either artistic genius, or an undiagnosed condition. Either way, onward and upward!
-alex fugazi
(shit just got real)
PS- BIG thanks to everyone who helped get this together, from Satch Grimley for the tip-off on the equipment, Lee Lundin and the AJL crew for all their technical experience, Nathan Beach for all the web design he’s going to have to do, and the customers and artists who make this all possible.
