Last week, I followed the after-sales team to a preserved fruit factory in Zhejiang to repair equipment. The workshop director Lao Zhou patted me on the shoulder and said: "Your small automatic packaging machine is smarter than my sweeping robot!" This made me laugh, but it makes sense when I think about it carefully-the technical skills hidden in this third-generation equipment are all the real skills that our engineers have "stolen" from the customer's workshop.
To say what surprises customers the most, it has to be the newly upgraded servo drive technology this year. In the past, there were always customers complaining about crooked seals on packaging bags, especially for manufacturers of puffed foods, where even a slight deviation would require the entire batch to be reworked. After visiting seven or eight workshops, our engineering team found that traditional small automatic packaging machines use ordinary stepper motors, which are prone to "losing temper" when encountering changes in the thickness of packaging materials. Now that it has been replaced with a dual servo drive system, it is like installing an autopilot on the equipment. Last month, Mr. Li from the Xiamen Dried Fish Factory even posted a video to show off that he used 0.02mm thick aluminum foil bags to package seaweed, and the sealing line did not deviate for ten hours of continuous operation.
The idea of modular design was actually inspired by children's building blocks. Last year, a foundry in Dongguan had to subpackage nuts for six brands at the same time, and the equipment had to be recalibrated every time it changed production. We simply made the core unit of the small automatic packaging machine into a "plug-in" structure, and the feeding mechanism, heat sealing module, and cutting unit can be quickly disassembled and assembled like changing a mobile phone case. Last month, their new operator, Xiao Chen, who was born in the 2000s, completed the switch from 100 grams to 250 grams of packaging specifications by himself in half an hour by watching the teaching video. The workshop director was so happy that he praised it to everyone he met: "This is much less troublesome than teaching new people to use old equipment!"
What I am most proud of is the intelligent calibration system. I remember that three years ago, I went to a pharmaceutical factory in Hebei to debug the equipment. It took two hours just to teach the workers to calibrate the weighing scale. Today's small automatic packaging machines will "check up" by themselves, and automatically detect more than ten key parameters every time they are turned on, just like there is an old master sitting in the machine. Last week, Mr. Zhang from the Yunnan Coffee Bean Factory said on the phone that their equipment has not had any moisture errors in the rainy season. Only then did I reveal the secret: we applied a military-grade moisture-proof coating on the circuit board, and the sensor also added a self-drying function.
Some people may think that small automatic packaging machines cannot use high-end technology, but our customers are very sophisticated. Last month, a pet food factory in Guangzhou came to us with a test report-they used an X-ray machine to spot check the packaging bags and found that the filling error of our equipment was nearly 40% lower than the industry standard. When the chief engineer heard about this, the old man led his team to improve the thread angle of the spiral feeder overnight, saying that he wanted to "push the packaging accuracy to the micron era." Now when I look at the sample bags sent back by customers, the jagged cutting lines at the seal are so neat that they can be used as rulers.
Speaking of technological breakthroughs, we have to mention last year's "extreme challenge." A seasoning factory in Shandong insisted on using a small automatic packaging machine to fill chili powder, which is light and fluffy, and easy to clump. Our technicians squatted in the workshop for three days and finally came up with a combined feeding solution of "airflow boost + mechanical vibration." When I visited again last month, the sketch of the solution drawn at that time was still posted on the wall of the workshop. The factory director joked that this was their "treasure of the factory."
Recently, the pharmaceutical packaging industry has also set its sights on our small automatic packaging machine. A cotton swab factory in Jiangsu moved its equipment into a sterile workshop and required zero contact during the packaging process. We put on a "protective suit" for the equipment-a fully sealed stainless steel shell with an air filtration system, and even the operation interface was changed to air touch. Their quality inspection supervisor, Lao Wu, said honestly: "This is not a packaging machine, it is clearly a medical device."
Every time I walk through the assembly workshop and listen to the regular sounds of the small automatic packaging machine during debugging, I always feel like I am listening to a technical symphony. A few days ago, a new intern asked: "Does such a small machine need so much black technology?" I took him to the customer case wall and pointed to the display board full of packaging bags from various industries: "Do you see the pet snack bag with a cartoon cat printed on it? Just this small 5-gram bag helped the customer win a 30 million order last year - our packaging accuracy is the customer's money printing accuracy!"
