Give your existing machines a new lease on life

Are you faced with increasing machine tool downtime? Are problems hard to diagnose? Are replacement parts getting harder to find? You don’t have to struggle with these challenges any longer. 

Kaufman Manufacturing can retrofit your existing industrial machines with new controls and drive systems, improving their reliability and increasing their service life for another 15 to 20 years. It offers this service for all makes and models of industrial production equipment. We can retrofit existing machines for a fraction of the cost of a new one.

This option is ideal for manufacturers that can’t justify a large capital expenditure to replace existing machines in high-production environments. But they still need to maximize the productivity and uptime from their existing machines. 

“Once the drives, electronic controls and other key components become obsolete, it gets harder and harder to find the parts so you can keep these old machines running,” explains Tyler Bowring, application engineer. 

A muscle and brain transplant

Kaufman’s retrofit program replaces the control panel – the ‘brains’ of the machine – as well as the muscle with new servo and spindle drive packages with current technology equipment.

These new controllers also make it much easier to diagnose and fix problems, because they display “plain English” status messages that pinpoint the cause of failure. That eliminates a lot of trial and error, so a maintenance or service person can quickly replace the failed switch or valve and minimize machine downtime.

“These modern controls can help you slash your downtime by 30% or more,” Bowring points out.

Kaufman has over 30 years of experience with all major controllers, including Fanuc, Allen-Bradley, Omron and Rexroth. In addition, the company offers something that electrical design houses can’t match: Deep knowledge of industrial equipment.

“We’ve been designing and building machine tools for some of the highest-production manufacturing environments in North America for over 90 years,” Bowring points out. Why is that important? “Because we know how your machines are built, how they operate – and, most importantly, what their most common failure modes are. That makes a big difference when we retrofit new controls and drives onto existing machines.”

A recent customer success story

One recent retrofit project was for a manufacturer in the automotive industry. It was a 22-year- old KaufmanFlexCNC machine that was being used in a critical production role. The hardware was still in good condition, but the OEM was having trouble sourcing replacement parts on the secondary market. 

Kaufman’s experienced team retrofitted this CNC machine with Fanuc controls, drives and servo motors, giving it a new lease on life.

“They should be able to get at least 10 more years of service out of that machine,” Bowring adds.

Kaufman is an authorized systems integrator with the knowledge and expertise to keep your industrial machinery running longer and better than it has in many years. It can provide turnkey control system solutions with system hardware and code programming to adapt new electronic control systems to your existing industrial machinery.