Company details for Adelco Screen Process Ltd

Adelco Screen Process Ltd

We purchased a large scale, used t-shirt printing machine from Adelco for £60,000. The machine was bought as “Sold as seen in full working order”. We were assured that the machine would be serviced on arrival and installed correctly. To ensure all necessary machine work was completed we were asked to pay an additional £4,000 for the engineer to spend a full 5 Days on site.The machine was delivered on 24th September 2020. Rob, Adelco’s engineer was on site and seemingly did what work was necessary and trained the team on how to use the printer. Rob left after only 3 days which didn’t immediately ring any alarm bells as he had shown that the printer worked when printing single t-shirts at low volume.

Our print business was not ready to launch yet so Rob advised that we keep the machine ‘ticking over’ by printing a t-shirt every two days just to keep the ink flowing through the machine. We followed Rob’s advice and when it finally came time to launch our business 5 months later we signed up for a service contract with the manufacturer which required a machine inspection.To our horror the machine had many faults which were deemed critical to the machine’s usage for mass production. The engineer, who acted on behalf of the manufacturer and carried out the inspection, warned us that we could not launch our business until over £6,000 of repair work was carried out. A large portion of the repair work was confirmed as essential setup work that should have happened at the point of installation by Adelco.

We raised our concerns with Adelco and also sent over the engineer’s inspection report which included such items as “Head Ink filters installed upside down and not located correctly” and many other similar faults. Whilst the machine was 5 months old by this point it had not been used other than to print one T-shirt every two days (75 x T-shirt prints in total). Anticipating that Adelco would empathise with our position and recognise their responsibility in not supplying a “in full working order” machine as agreed we told the manufacture to pause any repair work.

What followed was what can only be described as a ‘fingers in ears’ response from Adelco who were not willing to even listen to a legitimate complaint from one of their customers and were incredibly defensive at the mere suggestion that something might have gone wrong with the installation. A phone call with the owner of the company should have been an opportunity to find reconciliation but instead only revealed the degree of unprofessionalism which is guiding the business from the top down. To date we have had a brick wall response from Adelco and we have gone ahead and put our machine in the trusted hands of the manufacturer going forward. It has cost us a lot of money to bring the machine up to standard and we will certainly not be using Adelco again.

I’m writing this review to save other businesses from making the same mistake, whilst I cannot comment on how Adelco usually deals with it’s customers I suspect our case is not unusual. Today I heard of two other unhappy customers who had collectively spent over £200,000 on machinery with them, it would be unfair for me to post any details of their cases as I’ve only heard one side of their stories but it’s definitely interesting to find poor levels of aftercare and customer satisfaction where so much money is being spent.

By Mike Chamberlain of Dustandthings Limited - 26 March 2021