Refurbished Equipment

What a great discussion we have going on here regarding refurbished equipment and the value it offers. One of the benefits (their are a few) of being older and have been in the screen printing business 39 plus years, is observing countless transactions take place. This type of knowledge is only garnered with time, it tempers you in trying balance a "fair" deal when offering refurbished equipment. All buyers are looking for new at the price of used, this where "refurbished" comes in.

Refurbishing equipment is a full time job, not a hobby. Yes you can turn a machine out once or twice a year and call it refurbished (and maybe it is), but to actively send presses or dryers out correct and 100% serviceable requires a good deal of dedication to the project. I am going to address M&R machines in this post for simplicity's sake (ha nothing simple about it), these are about 80% of the used market so the focus is M&R.

I have 3000 SKU's (stock keeping units) on hand, almost all are for M&R machines, couple of pictures of a small portion of our parts inventory is below: Mac Valves and Temperature Controllers. I was at CGS's operation a couple of months ago, they have a similar parts inventory at their operation also. Our operations are full of OEM items (original equipment manufactured), these are invaluable in refurbishing machines. Having these on hand greatly streamlines the repairs, if the parts aren't on hand then you order parts and wait, find the next problem and start over with ordering parts and waiting. Operating this way is for hobby shops, if you are serious you need to have the parts "on hand". Both of our operations have a small fortune in tools, spares and new parts, the hobby shop is not set up the same way.

Beyond parts you need qualified technicians, when we are at full force, I pay $138.00/ an hour for my four technicians. The four men and myself have a combined nearly 70 years in the business. Any good service tech can refurbish a machine, however they can't churn out 2-6 machines a month, this requires a work force of capable hands and brains.

I don't know how any party that dabbles in used equipment can offer a warranty or how they could possibly provide one. If the machine is sold local to them then I guess they could personally handle the warranty. A long distance repair can be very expensive if you aren't linked up with a network of trusted technicians. I know CGS and my company have relationships with technicians from coast to coast and several foreign countries.

Attached are a few pictures of machines before and after, these are not the best we turn out or the worst we take in. The nice Electronics Enclosure is from a machine that was at CGS a couple of months ago when I was in NJ. The 1992 Challenger control panel and head is from a machine we delivered yesterday (completely gone through and ready for millions of additional prints), the two before pictures are of a little worse than average, these are of a basket case we took in. Now it looks like it just came out of the crate from the factory new, All New Wiring, CPU, I/O boards, Encoder, Operator Interface, Head Drives, Air Cylinders, Paint....etc etc etc.

These transformations are what makes a refurbished machine worth the money over a straight "used machine". I offer the machines "AS IS" just as they came to me, hardly anyone wants them, even for considerably less money. CGS and Seritech are competitors, but I respect the work they do and in my estimation refurbished machines from either of us are a great alternative to new and huge improvement over the projects we take in that the sellers represent as "good operating machines".

Jimi Hendrix made playin a guitar look easy, it always looks easy from the outside, doing things right takes practice. The used equipment business is not easy and over the past few years quite a few scoundrels have taken a swing at plucking the "strings" of a lot of hard working screen printers. Do your research check everybody out, new paint does not equal refurbished. By the way neither of us is the Jimi Hendrix of used machines, he doesn't exist.

My wife calls a post like this "Poking the Snake", let's see what happens.