Sometimes our managers hear the phrase “Why are yours so expensive? I could buy two packaging machines from those guys for the same money!” And I don’t even want to explain for a long time why we don’t want to sell “such” equipment. But recently we were asked to configure a cheap “noname” packaging machine. So we can show by example why cheap things later become very expensive.

The first thing that caught my eye was that the electrical wires were routed incorrectly, and they were rubbing against each other while the machine was running. So this would probably be the quickest possible malfunction.

But then we looked at the film stretching mechanism and realized that it could compete with electricity in terms of failure rate. The thing is that the stretching drive here had plastic gears. And there was also no normal film feed that would compensate for the load when stretching it. This would also be a big headache in the operation of the machine: the film starts to sag, can fall out of the sealing jaws or get stuck in the former.

Then, we started to configure it. What can I say… The settings are minimal. Well, that's it. But all this is on one board and this board is not an industrial controller at all. That is, it is impossible to reprogram this machine. And if something in the control fails, then you need to change the entire board. And you have to look for the same one.

These are not all the shortcomings that we saw. Not everything is good with the printer and photo tag sensor. There are also some questions about the dispenser. For those who are interested, watch our short video review.

And yes, we have not sold such equipment and will never sell it. Because our conscience does not allow us to. Because we are responsible for the quality that we offer our customers. And disposable packaging machines will never be included in our equipment catalog.