volpak machines are great and if looked after run with little maintenance once in a whilst need walking beam rebuild the part that moves bags a long at front worked in a team of 4 people and ran 5 s240df zipper bag machines with ishida weighers out put about 20 thousand tones a year
I replaced the $1500 punch and die for the tear notch with a $2 Xacto blade knife with barely any modification of the original design. Not only is it MUCH cheaper, but there will never again be any re-work or bad product if the vacuum system malfunctions and allows the little, plastic chads to fall into the pouch. Probably saved the company $100K/year before they fired me for turning my supervisor in for an ethics complaint. They went out of business shortly thereafter. Schadenfreude. Let me know if you want to know how I did it. It's ridiculously easy and works perfectly.
