November 2, 2026 · Indumor
What is a machine worth when it runs well but nobody can repair it?
That is the situation in plenty of Argentine plants: a German rewinder from 1996, an Italian packaging machine that came with the line, a Chinese press from eight years ago whose importer moved on to another business. While they run, they are worth gold. The day the headstock shaft breaks, they are worth whatever time the spare takes to arrive.
The manufacturer no longer exists, or exists but discontinued the model, or still makes it but the spare comes at a price that makes no sense and arrives by sea in three to six months, with customs in between. Sometimes the supplier's answer is worse than silence: they offer to replace the whole assembly, because the single part is no longer sold.
And in the plant's own shop, the drawing is not there. It never was. The machine came with an operating manual, a photocopied wiring diagram and a parts list with codes that no longer mean anything.
The first is the stoppage, measured in lost days of production and felt on the next shift. The second is quieter. To avoid going through that again, stock gets bought, a shaft, two special bearings, a set of knives, all imported, all sitting on a shelf in the storeroom waiting for a failure that may never come. Money frozen for years. The third is fear, because a machine that cannot be repaired gets babied so much that it runs less than it could.
A machine that people are afraid of produces half of what it could.
Copy it as it was. If the part did its job for fifteen years, the design was right. The broken or worn part is surveyed, the wear is allowed for, the material is identified by hardness or with a spectrometer, and the part is made the same, with the same heat treatment. It is the shortest road and the right one for shafts, bushings, gears, knives and wear parts.
Improve it. If the part kept failing, the copy has to change something. An alloy steel instead of a carbon steel, a larger radius where it cracked, one gauge more on the wear plate, case hardening where there was surface quenching. The geometry that mates with the rest of the machine is kept to the millimeter; what fails gets corrected.
Redesign the assembly. When what is missing is not a part but a whole subassembly, a headstock, a gearbox with an odd ratio, an electronic control that can no longer be sourced, it is often better to replace it with off-the-shelf components. Standard bearings instead of special ones, a commercial gearmotor with the same output speed, a VFD and a PLC that any electrician in town knows. The adapter gets designed, a flange, a plate, a base, and the old machine ends up with a new heart that does have spares around the corner.
Ask yourself three things. Did the part fail from normal wear or from a design flaw? Normal wear, copy it; flaw, improve it. Is what broke a part or a system? A part, copy or improve; a system, redesign. How many more times will this happen? If the machine will stay in the plant another ten years, it is worth investing so the next failure gets solved in days.
And whatever you do, use the momentum to build the machine's critical spares list, the five or ten parts that stop it if they break. Each one with its drawing, its material and its treatment, even if they are healthy today. Surveying them with the machine running costs little; surveying them with the plant down costs what the stoppage costs.
How a broken part is measured to make it again is in spare parts without drawings; what changes when a whole machine is built again, in copy and improve a machine; and the full service, with survey, drawings and fabrication at the Ferreyra plant in Córdoba, Argentina, in industrial reverse engineering by Indumor.
Survey, drawings and fabrication of the copy at our plant.
View service →Tell us which one and what broke. We survey it and tell you whether to copy, improve or redesign, with price and lead time.
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