Saturday morning, we were on the road down to Romford in Essex to look at a bulk pot-filling machine for a dairy customer, built around a Dizayn Makina D-22 lid-handling unit. Bigger than the one we looked at the week before — this one’s set up to run two lanes, filling 5 litre and 1 litre tubs.
The customer bought it at auction. No history. No manual. And before finding Engineering Support 24/7, no engineer they could rely on to actually sort it.
That combination — no history, no manual — changes how you have to work.
What The Job Was
Get both lanes running, automatically, without someone stood there babysitting it. Understand every fault on the machine, fix what we could on the day, and come away with a plan for the rest.
I couldn’t get a clear answer from the customer on whether the machine had actually been run properly since they’d had it, or whether it had only ever limped along with manual intervention. My read on it is the latter.
What We Found
Started simple. An air leak — quick win, got us off the ground.
From there it was the usual archaeology of a machine nobody’s maintained: sensors needing a clean, general lubrication, settings that were clearly never quite right. Nothing dramatic on its own, but it adds up on a machine that’s had no proper attention.
Then we lost timing partway through. Traced it back to the turntable-to-driveshaft clamp bolts — four of them, only two actually tight. A lid had jammed into the mechanism mid-cycle and shifted things. Reset it, but it’s a good reminder that “loose bolts all over the machine” isn’t an exaggeration on kit like this — it’s usually exactly what you find.
Keep suction cups in stock. Always. The lid pick-up relies on them, and the silicone degrades over time whether you’re running the machine or not. Damage one with no spare in the van and the machine simply doesn’t run. I class these as a critical spare for any machine that uses them — not a nice-to-have, a stock item.
The Bit That Beat Us — For Now
The real problem was the lid pick station — the transfer where the lid gets picked up and placed onto the pot. This is always fiddly. Timing has to be identical every cycle or you get mechanical components dropping at different rates and you end up with a smash-up instead of a sealed pot.
We got it running well enough to move on to the next fault rather than sinking hours into fine-tuning it there and then. Good enough to progress, not perfect — that’s a deliberate call, not corner-cutting.
Once we did get it running, the real issue showed up: no adjustment available for the vacuum that holds the lid, so it was either dropping too soon or holding on too long. No repeatable centre line on the pot. That’s the difference between a machine that works and a machine that works reliably.
My understanding is there are three cams running off the drive motor, and I’d put money on one of them controlling vacuum timing. But there’s no manual, and this customer already lost enough running the thing on guesswork before we turned up.
So we stopped.
We’re always reluctant to guess our way through a machine we don’t fully understand. Start playing with cam timing without knowing exactly what each one does and you can easily leave a machine worse off than you found it — sometimes with damage that costs a lot more than the hours you saved. We’ve paused it there, we’re chasing the manufacturer for information, and we’ll go back in once we actually know what we’re adjusting.
The Lesson
Going into a machine with no history is always going to be slower than working on kit you know. There’s no shortcut for that — you just work through the faults one at a time. Most solve quickly. A few will always need more than one visit.
The job isn’t to fix everything in one sitting. It’s to find every fault, fix what you safely can, and know exactly where the line is between “I understand this well enough to touch it” and “I’m about to find out the hard way.”
This one’s not finished. But the customer’s gone from a machine they couldn’t run to a machine that’s mostly working, with a clear plan for the rest.
More on the cams once we’ve got the manual.
If you’ve inherited a piece of kit with no history and no manual, our Filling Machine Repair and Maintenance service is built exactly for jobs like this — get in touch and we’ll get it running.