Spare parts and adaptations for Chinese machinery: what to import and what to make locally

November 2, 2026  ·  Indumor

“The spare part takes three months and I need the machine on Monday.” With small variations, it is the line we hear most from people who bought Chinese machinery, and it reaches the shop several times a month. It is almost never a quality problem. It is distance, language and the lack of drawings, and it gets handled at three different moments: before buying, while the machine is working and after the first breakdown.

Before buying

Ask for the spare parts list with prices together with the quote for the machine, not afterwards. What is worth buying in that same order is the electronics and whatever wears out: the drive, the power supply, the screen, the boards, the specific sensors, the encoders, the solenoid valves, plus blades and bushings for two years. They travel in the same container, and later they take two months. Ask as well for the drawings of the wear parts, or at least their dimensions and material, the PLC program with its password and the manuals in the original Chinese, because machine translation works better from the original than from half-finished English. If you are going to handle the commissioning without the factory technician, that documentation is worth more than the discount.

While the machine is working

From China it makes sense to import what is not made here: drives, screens, boards, unusual sensors. By sea it is 45 to 60 days, plus customs. By air it is days, and it costs what it costs; for a two-kilo part that has the plant stopped, the airfreight pays for itself.

The rest gets made locally, and it usually comes out better than the original. Shafts, bushings, wear plates, hoppers, guards, structures and blades get measured from the old part, drawn and manufactured, often in a better steel than the one that came. How that is done is in spare parts without drawings. Is it worth waiting two months for a bushing that a lathe makes in an afternoon?

Then there are the adaptations. A motor with a flange that does not exist here gets replaced by an IEC motor on a machined adapter plate. An odd gearbox gets swapped for a standard one on a new base. A bearing with a strange size almost always has an ISO equivalent, and when it does not, a bushing gets machined so the one that does exist can be used. When the whole machine is orphaned of spares, the decision gets bigger, and we cover it in imported machine with no spare parts.

There is a habit we see often and that costs money. The part breaks on a Friday afternoon, someone takes a photo of it with a phone and sends it to the shop with a “how much?” No dimensions, no material, no idea which machine it goes in or what load it carries. A photo cannot be quoted or manufactured from, and the whole weekend is lost. The part travels to the shop, whole or in pieces, and if wear has eaten the dimensions, the one next to it travels too.

After the first breakdown

The first stoppage teaches you what is critical. Whatever stops the machine and cannot be bought the same day goes into stock: almost always electronics and wear parts, and rarely more than ten line items. And every part that went through the shop stays drawn, with material and heat treatment noted. Two years in, the machine has its own set of drawings even if not one ever came from China.

A typical case is a milling line that stopped twice in its first year, once for a blade and once for a bushing. Both parts were measured, made locally in a heat-treated steel and kept in stock with their drawings. The third stoppage never happened. If you have a Chinese machine with spares that do not arrive, at Indumor we measure the part and make it to fit your machine.

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