Spare Parts & AMC

The parts that actually wear

Across the range, the same short list accounts for most of what a plant orders:

• Strapping machines — heater blade, cutter, gripper, feed and reverse rollers, belts, the strap chute liner, and the arch guides.
• Carton sealing machines — tape head blades and rollers, drive belts, side belts, and the top and bottom tape head assemblies as a unit when a rebuild is not economic.
• Wrapping machines — turntable drive belt and bearings, film carriage rollers, the pre-stretch gear set, and the film clamp.
• Material handling — pallet truck wheels in nylon or polyurethane, load rollers, seal kits for the hydraulic unit, the pump handle and the release lever.
• Sealing machines — element wire, PTFE tape, silicone pad, and the timer board.

How to order the right part first time

Part names vary between suppliers, so a name alone is the least reliable way to order. Send, in this order of usefulness: a photograph of the old part, the machine serial plate, and then the name you know it by.

For anything cut to length — heater blades, element wire, belts — the measurement matters more than the name. Measure the old one rather than the slot it sits in.

If the machine came from us, the order reference alone is usually enough. We can look up what was fitted.

Genuine parts, and why we make a point of it

A heater blade of the wrong alloy will seal for a week and then start dropping seals intermittently, which is far worse than failing outright — you lose the cartons before you find the cause. The same is true of a cheaper cutter that rolls its edge, or a belt of the wrong shore hardness that slips only under load.

We stock the parts the machines were built with. Where a part is imported — sealing heads, motors, pneumatics, control parts from established suppliers in China and Taiwan — it is the same source, inspected here before it goes out.

Annual maintenance contracts

An AMC makes sense when the machine is on a line that cannot afford an unplanned stop, and it makes less sense on a machine that runs an hour a day. We will tell you which yours is.

A contract is written against your machines and your shift pattern rather than sold as a package: scheduled visits, the wear parts to be replaced on each visit, response terms for a breakdown, and what is excluded. The exclusions are the part worth reading, and we put them in plain words.

For the Fulcrum Infratech catalogue models, installation and service are handled by Fulcrum Infratech Pvt. Ltd. — the same company, the same works — and the contract says so on its face.

Building a spares kit before you need one

The cheapest spare part is the one already on your shelf. A kit is not an upsell; it is the difference between a fifteen-minute stop and a two-day one, and for a machine on a line that cannot stop the arithmetic is not close.

Size it to your run rate rather than to the machine. A strapping machine doing 300 packs a day and one doing 3,000 wear the same parts at very different speeds, so the same kit is either wasteful or useless.

For most machines the useful kit is small: the two parts that wear fastest, the one that is awkward to source locally, and the one whose failure stops the machine outright rather than degrading it. Tell us the model and the shift pattern and we will name them.

Reading wear before it becomes a breakdown

Machines give warning, and operators usually notice before anyone measures anything. A seal that needs a longer dwell than it did last month. Strap tension that has to be turned up to get the same result. A carton whose tape lifts at one corner only. A pallet truck that settles slowly under load.

Each of those is a part reaching the end of its life, not a machine failing. Replaced at that point it is a five-minute job on a planned stop. Left alone, the same part fails mid-shift and often takes something else with it.

Ask your operators what has changed rather than waiting for a stoppage report. They know.