Auckland engineering firm Allied Machinery Services has responded to a fresh market demand for breathing new life into machinery, still needed by print and finishing shops but often no longer available new.
Mark Pascoe, a director and service engineer at Allied Machinery Services, says the company has become something of a specialist in machinery rebuilds that not only extend the life span of some printing, packaging and mailing equipment, but substantially improve their performance.
He says, “We recently rebuilt a Zandan Burrs crash folder for a mailing house, that took A4 booklets and folded them into DLE size. They had bought the machine in the 1980’s but it had almost passed its use by date and it was sitting around their factory and not really being very useful. There are very few of these machines around but when they are working they are great although the technology is fairly old now.”
For the mailing house, the option of sourcing and purchasing a brand new machine overseas was problematic so they asked Allied Machinery Services to refurbish the existing one. Pascoe says the machine had originally had a unit on it which folded and put a band around a pile. He says, “This was once a good mailing solution but, when things changed, the company had taken that particular unit off it because they never used it. We restored the rest of the machine to an almost new position and they are thrilled with it.”
He says AMS can rebuild just about any piece of equipment to bring it up to speed and it is a viable alternative to buying a new machine or a secondhand one. He adds, “Crash folders are hard to get and there is a big demand for the machines. I don’t even know if they are being manufactured anymore and people who do own one certainly hang onto them.
“Sometimes, it is simply a case of updating or refurbishing some of the parts and giving the machine a once over in terms of maintenance, so it will have a much longer and more productive working life. We can also manufacture units to complete different tasks on existing machines to enhance their functionality.”
He concludes. “Rebuilds, upgrades or refurbishments needn’t be a major upheaval. In some cases the work can be done relatively quickly. For example, the Zandan machine only took a month to complete.”
