Rebuilds & Retrofits

A machine built by another manufacturer can still be a good machine. If the base is sound, the spindle is true and the mechanical design suits the part, the fact that someone else built it is not a reason to scrap it, even when that someone else no longer supports it, no longer exists, or no longer wants the job.

Balance Technology rebuilds and retrofits balancing machines, gages and test stands built by other manufacturers. It is a different kind of project than rebuilding one of our own, and we are straightforward about the difference: we start without the original drawings, without the source code and without the build record. What we bring instead is more than 14,000 machines of this class designed and built since 1968, which means we can work out what a machine was doing and why.

Why Customers Bring Us Other Manufacturers’ Machines

The original builder is gone. Acquired, closed, or exited the product line. Nobody answers the phone, and the spares are whatever is left on your shelf.

Support exists but doesn’t fit how the plant needs to run.

The controls are obsolete. An unsupported operating system, a PLC out of production, a drive nobody stocks, a proprietary measurement card with no replacement. Meanwhile the iron is fine.

The software is a dead end. Source code was never delivered, the people who wrote it have moved on, and no one can change a part program, a tolerance or a data export format.

The machine never quite worked. This is more common than the industry admits. A machine that was commissioned marginally and has been fought with ever since, where the underlying problem is fixturing, datum scheme or measurement approach rather than components.

You want it to do more. Add a measurement, add a station, add automation, add data.

How We Approach a Machine We Did Not Build

Assessment first, always. We do not quote a competitor rebuild from photographs. We need to understand the mechanical condition, the measurement chain, the control architecture and what the machine is actually doing now versus what it is supposed to do. On a machine of unknown provenance, the assessment is the most important part of the project, and we treat it as its own piece of work.

Keep the iron, replace the intelligence. The usual outcome. Bases, weldments, spindles and ways from a reputable builder are frequently excellent and expensive to reproduce. Controls, software, sensors, drives and tooling are where obsolescence lives and where we can bring the machine fully current with our own systems.

Our control system, our software. When we retrofit, the machine gets a BTI control system and BTI software. That is the point: afterward, the machine is supportable by us, with part programs you can change, data you can export, and a phone number that is answered. A retrofit that leaves the proprietary black box in place solves nothing.

Re-establish the measurement chain. We work out how the machine locates the part, what it measures against, and whether that datum scheme matches your print. On machines that never performed well, this is usually where the problem has been hiding.

Prove it on your parts. Acceptance is run against criteria written into the scope, on your parts, before the machine goes back to work.

Adding Capability

A retrofit is often the cheapest way to get a capability you do not currently have. If a competitor’s balancer already spins your part on a precise axis, adding eddy current crack detection, dimensional gaging, surface measurement or resonant frequency testing to that spindle turns it into a combination machine for a fraction of what a new combination machine costs.

Whether the existing structure will carry the addition (the envelope, the rigidity, the access, the cycle time) is a question the assessment answers. Sometimes the answer is no, and we say so before anyone spends money.

What We Cannot Do

We will not tell you we can do something we have not established we can do.

We do not reverse engineer proprietary software to keep it running. If the existing software is the problem, the answer is to replace it with ours, not to patch something we did not write and cannot support.

We do not warrant the parts of the machine we did not touch. A scope that replaces the controls does not make us responsible for a spindle bearing we never opened, and we will be explicit in the scope about where that line falls.

Where the mechanical design is fundamentally unsuited to what you now need (wrong capacity, wrong speed range, wrong correction method, structure worn past economical repair) we will recommend a new machine, even though a retrofit would have been easier to sell.