Adam Covitt of Federal Equipment Company joins David to discuss what to look for when purchasing tablet presses.
About this segment of Blackbird TV
Guest: Adam Covitt, President, Federal Equipment Company. To learn more about our guest, visit FedEquip.com, or call 888-764-3455.
Recorded: November 16, 2020
Published: June 22, 2021
Segment transcript
Joining me is Adam Covitt from Federal Equipment in Cleveland, OH, and Adam is a specialist in pharmaceutical and pharmaceutical equipment. Adam today’s question is, tablet presses. Everybody takes pills and vitamins and capsules and for the life of me I’ve been doing this 30 years and I I don’t understand them and I lean on you guys to help me tell us what’s important when you’re buying a used tablet press. Thanks Dave, great to be here. Thanks for having us so Federal Equipment, one of our main areas is oral solid dose equipment so tablet presses is really a main focus for us. We tend to carry all the major manufacturers and we we buy high end equipment from manufacturers like Fette and IMA and Korsch, and we stick to well known brands. There are a lot of offshoot manufacturers. Machines are copied overseas and they’re high tolerance high speed machines that need to be maintained. OK, you’re talking about high pressure coming down on a piece of powder. The powder has to be blended properly. You have to have the right lubrication. You have to be careful that you don’t have pieces of metal ending up in something that’s actually going into human consumption, so there’s a lot of things involved with the tablet press, how you properly clean it, how you polish tools, how you maintain the machine, and make sure it’s in good operating condition. So first of all, we focus on the higher end manufacturers that we know our customers are going to get good support, parts, training, upgrades for controls. There’s a million things that go along with it. But one of the things that sets us apart, as we have a training center. And our training center’s run by a guy named Mike Tousey who’s got 40 years experience. He started polishing tools and making tools for tablet presses many years ago., as a young guy. He now has developed a program, the company’s called Techceuticals. We’ve built a full lab that’s adjacent to our facility on training people on the proper way to maintain run tablets. Look at defects. What happens if you get a black spot in your tablet? What happens if your tablet is capping? Meaning the top of the tablet is falling off. How do you properly clean a tablet press? How do you polish it properly? How do you make sure that your product isn’t going to get metal or other contaminants in it? So Mike teaches a course and one of the things that we do is we have clients from around the world fly into our facility, come in and learn and actually the manufacturers will come in and train on in Mikes lab and we also have an online program that our clients can sign up for. So if they have new operators, new people running tablet presses, or even trainers that want to properly learn how to train one of their employees on running a tablet press, so these are the things that we do that set us apart. We are highly regulated by the DEA Drug Enforcement Agency, doesn’t want a used equipment dealer selling machines to places that don’t have DEA registration. So we trace the machines where it comes from, what truck it went on, how it was stored, where it’s shipped, who is shipping to. Making sure our potential customers have DEA registrations. And we keep that on file. So if we do, if we are inspected by the DEA were able to say to them this is where that tablet press went and who went to it. It went to a reputable manufacturer. And they want to stop Walter White from Breaking Bad from making tablets in the desert, I guess, right? 100% and there’s a lot of overseas guys that are copying tablet presses, and they’re just shipping them all over the place and it’s a real problem. It’s a problem in our industry and we as a business will not touch these machines from Asia from India. They are inferior machines. We like to keep the high end stuff that’s traceable that we know our customers can get good service parts and they’re going to make good tablets so that that’s kind of what sets, uh, sets us apart from the other manufacturers. Adam, it’s all fascinating and every one of those little vitamin C tablets that I take now has a little bit more meaning. How they made them. You know it’s amazing David. There’s so many things it’s like baking a cookie. There are so many things that go into making a good tablet. It’s not just the press, it’s the blending, it’s the milling. It’s the ingredients. It’s lubrication, it’s the weight. Making sure the tablet is the proper weight is very important in hardness and thickness. There’s so many variables that go into it, so it’s it’s really an art form, so it’s kind of like making a good chocolate chip cookie. What a great analogy. Adam, thank you so much for bringing that up today and and helping us out. You have a great day and thanks for your time. You too be safe. Thanks for having me Dave.