If you have been following this recent series of articles, you’ll find that many of them have the same common denominator – customer satisfaction or rather – lack of it. That is the ultimate soft spot, the most vulnerable of all Achilles’ heels for every manufacturer of pretty much anything (including us, yes). Whether you make shoes or robots or – adhesives – you ultimately want your customers to be happy with your product and:

1. Come back for more – sure, we all live on revenue
2. Speak of you in superlatives if ever they do mention you, because – reputation is priceless!

Which is why we all equally dread anything ever going wrong with our products once they are put to use. And for one of our eastern European customers manufacturing screen printers, that’s exactly what happened because of – you’re guessing by now, I’m sure – some bolts that kept coming loose.

The way that these large scale printers work exposes the bolts to a lot of vibration, causing side to side movement of the bolts, which the gap between the threads easily allowed. As most of us know, printing process is a rather hot business, too so there is plenty of thermal expansions and contractions that certainly do not help keep the assembly stable. In such conditions, it takes very few cycles before the bolts start loosening.

Applying medium strength threadlocker Loctite 243 in the production of the printers, quickly put a stop to all that. The manufacturer avoided any further customer complaints, while their customers from that point on enjoyed an increased production efficiency.