Second time around

The bottom may have dropped out of the second-hand car market but sales of previously-owned drycleaning machines are still buoyant, at least for the moment!

To emphasise the fact, used car dealer, Adrian Wright, threw in the towel last November, left his car lot and opened a drycleaning business in Armagh, Northern Ireland. His choice of equipment? Second hand, of course!

Allied Equipment, based in nearby Lisburn, supplied Adrian with a steam heated Böwe 520 and ancillary finishing kit. The price was around 50% of the new list price and included delivery, installation and connection to services. Only a keen eye would spot that the equipment was not new from the factory.

Thirty years

“We have supplied Böwe machinery for nearly 30 years and the style of build is so robust that a life expectancy of 15 or more years is quite realistic,” explains Allied’s proprietor, Sam Smyth. “Many of the machines we maintain are over 25 years old. New equipment accounts for 50% of our sales in Northern Ireland but the rest is all second-hand or reconditioned and the proportion is growing not declining.”

Most second-hand drycleaning equipment is sold by smaller dealers and family-run engineering companies like CCS, DryTech, Allied Equipment and Multicare Systems but some of the big distributors do rebuild machines to order. Duval, for example, regularly advertises a reconditioning service and has rebuilt and converted over 150 AMA Rebels into “Rebellions” to run on perchloroethylene.

By contrast, Jonathan Gray, sales director at Firbimatic UK, says quite bluntly that he would prefer to see all old machinery scrapped.

“We are not second-hand dealers. We occasionally find a home for a good used machine to make room for a new one or we will put someone in touch with a cleaner who we know is looking for something second-hand but for the most part we would prefer to see older equipment completely decomissioned to make way for newer technology.”

While this is quite an understandable position for an innovative, primarily sales-oriented organisation, you may note that Firbimatic’s sister company, TES, runs what is by far the UK’s best-equipped rebuilding and reconditioning operation.

Managing director, Morris Wood, will take on board any project from a 25 year old Spencer 350 to a Duval Mito. If they haven’t got the necessary parts in stock (and TES carries parts for most brands of machine) they will make it themselves. Complete machines of just about every brand you have ever heard of are racked and meticulously catalogued in TES’s Pershore warehouse so they can be used as patterns.

Made in-house

A still, tank, water separator or recovery head can usually be made in-house cheaper and faster than it can be obtained from the original equipment manufacturer and computer boards are reworked and part exchanged for as little as £75. (When you consider that a replacement board for a Böwe 5-series machine could put you back £1000 to £1500 from the OEM, TES is a company worth knowing about!)

Whether you buy privately, through one of the larger distributors or one of the smaller second-hand specialists, you can hardly fail to notice that the lion’s share of reconditioned drycleaning machines on offer in the UK carry a Böwe nameplate. Böwe may have lost its way in recent times but no one (not even a competitor) questions the quality of the equipment it built in the 1980s and early 90s.

Put a 5th generation machine on the scales and weigh it. To an experienced engineer, that is almost as accurate an indication of manufacturing cost as a detailed bill of quantities. Böwe machines were heavy and obviously built to last.

“The same is true of Seco and German spec Ilsa machines,” says Michael Hopkinson of Multicare Systems in Grays, Essex.

“Böwe and Seco are (or at least were) to drycleaning what Mercedes and BMW are to the car world, typical high-quality German engineering, built to last and with a high resale value.

Likewise with the Ilsa machines built for the German market and sold under the Multimatic label - they were top quality machines.”

Not surprisingly Keith Tyrrell, director of Permac Technical Services in Hayes, agrees. He has been associated with Böwe for nigh on 20 years, although Böwe in Germany decided recently, for reasons best known to itself, not to appoint Permac as its official UK distributor.

Permac still fields a team of 13 Böwe-trained engineers and remains the largest Böwe specialist in the country.

Keith warns against, “cowboys who recondition with a spray can,” and stresses that Permac strip all their machines to the bare carcass and inspect thoroughly before rebuilding. Tanks are power-washed, stills are modified to current standards and pressure tested to 9bar, pump and fan bearings are automatically replaced as are dryer units, expansion valves, gaskets, seals and filter disks. Panels can be resprayed to order.

  “Anyone in the know would go for a 5th generation machine out of choice but I’d be the first to admit that this quality of build only comes at a price,” he says. “A reconditioned machine from Permac is often the most affordable option.”

Michael Hopkinson no longer does the reconditioning himself in the UK but has the work carried out to order in the factory of origin or by an approved distributor, usually in Germany.

Dumping ground

“I think that Germany saw the UK as a convenient dumping ground for their old machines in the past,” he says, “but that’s all over now. We no longer deal in 4th generation machines or anything that might be considered obsolete. The only machines coming out of Germany now are 5th generation to 4th and 5th BlmSchV (German) standards.

  Sometimes the very high spec makes these machines too expensive for the UK market, and many are now being rebuilt and resold in Germany.”

The best deals he points out are usually on the larger sizes.

“Smaller machines, 10 and 12kg, cost almost as much to rebuild as the large ones and the resale price isn’t that much cheaper than that of a new modern equivalent.

On the other hand a rebuilt Seco 301 (18kg) complete with spray system and auto still-rakeout will sell for about £8500 compared with a new price of £25 000. A Böwe 540 (20kg) to the same specification is about £12 500 ex-London compared with a new price of £28 000 or more. With a 12 month unconditional warranty that has to be good value for money.”

What happens when sources dry up? “Modern machines just aren’t made to the same standards,” confides Keith Tyrrell, “Not even Böwe!” Sam Smyth and Michael Hopkinson both agree without hesitation.

Sale prices

Modern machines have many innovative technical features but they are a lighter build altogether than they were a decade ago and designed down to a price.

If the sales price today is less than half what it was in real terms 10 years ago, something must have been sacrificed somewhere.

Whether this is good or bad is another question but it is undoubtedly the way of the world and the product of a marketplace that has come to expect more and more for less and less. What it does mean is an end to the boyscout’s penknife approach to machinery maintenance (you know, five new blades, three new handles but still the same knife).

Machinery is no longer designed to last indefinitely, so, if buying new, make sure you get a payback on your investment within a reasonable period and don’t factor in a high resale value.

There may no longer be a “second-time-around” and Jonathan Gray may yet have the last word!