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Squeegee Blade selection OEM? Coated?

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#82514

Squeegee Blade selection OEM? Coated? | 8 May, 2019

Hi All,

I'm looking for opinions on Squeegee Blade selection.

Do you use OEM blades, or aftermarket? Do you prefer coated blades? Do you have a preferred vendor?

It's a good topic for discussion.

thanks!

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#82516

Squeegee Blade selection OEM? Coated? | 8 May, 2019

You would have to do some extensive testing to really now for sure how much better coated blades perform than OEM blades.

Deciding whether or not they last longer is just a function of regular inspections under a scope and accounting for the number of cycles on each blade set.

It would help to have two lines running two different types of new blades *and* building the same product in the same quantities, but not many of us have that luxury.

I guess if you are OK with making a lot of assumptions you could just replace them all and then see how your "print related defect" rate reacted to the change.

For the record, waaaayyy back when I bought squeegee blades, I bought the coated ones from JNJ and thought they worked great, but I didn't really do anything but look closely at them from time to time. Of course the OEM blades that they replaced were trashed so it really wasn't a fair comparison. I figure that would be the case for quite a few people.

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#82534

Squeegee Blade selection OEM? Coated? | 10 May, 2019

The only difference I've noticed going from OEM to after market/coated is, as a maintenance tech I don't get as much complaining from the line operators about the condition of their blades once we switched. We buy from Transition Automation.

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