From the beginning to the present day, the design of HST tea bag machines has been nurtured and further developed within the company's mechanical engineering division by today's senior partner, Dr. Gerhard Klar. The machines are used in our own three production facilities and are also sold to packers all over the world.

The basic idea behind HST mechanical engineering is the principle of radical simplicity, with the goal of achieving maximum functionality with the least possible effort. When the design of the first tea packaging machines began over 50 years ago, the design challenge was to build a reliable machine despite the truly limited financial and technical resources available at the time: this involved, for example, avoiding all unnecessary parts and movements, combining all functions of the machine clearly on a single working level to make them visible and therefore easily accessible for replacing spare parts, or making the gearbox maintenance-free and long-lasting. Consequently, the machines are quiet and economical in energy consumption (the motor consumes less energy than a household hair dryer, namely under 1 kW!).
At HST Maschinenbau, we have always remained true to this relatively simple basic concept over the past seven decades. Even technicians are repeatedly surprised when looking at the PT machines by how little "machine" is actually needed to manufacture tea bags.

Profitability
Our answer to the question of a tea bag machine's profitability is therefore: the profitability of a tea bag machine is an optimization across a combination of criteria, such as

• Purchase price

• Operating costs (maintenance requirements, spare parts consumption, and energy consumption)

• Operating requirements and qualification demands

• Output (production speed, running stability, and scrap rate),

• Downtime (cleaning times, outage times, repair durations, changeover times)

• Flexibility in setup, footprint, and noise emissions

• Range of filling materials, filling tolerances

• Requirements for the operating environment

The HST machine series PT20, 25, 33 meets this requirement profile ideally, resulting in robust machines that have proven themselves outstandingly all over the world, even in developing countries. Not without reason, as an emerging tea country, Sri Lanka has a very large number of PT machines installed to the satisfaction of our customers.

Speed
HST machines are designed for economic optimum rather than maximum speed and therefore run at capacities of 140 to 175 tea bags per minute, depending on the model. It is well known that there are machines on the market that are twice as fast, but also at least twice as expensive. This comes with the disadvantage that if one of these fast machines fails, the entire production capacity of a tea packing plant is affected and brought to a standstill. The HST product concept responds economically to this fact and therefore offers two machines that are equally fast in sum for the price of one faster competitor machine. In the event of a machine breakdown, half the capacity still keeps running with HST machines, making outages far less dramatic. Fortunately, this product concept is being embraced by more and more customers and is proven every day by the competitiveness of our own packing plants. ... It must be a machine that runs and runs and runs ... (Films for PT Group)

Customers
Ideal buyers for HST machines are therefore:

• Small packing operations and founders who are starting tea packaging from scratch. They can keep the required investment sum relatively low and tackle the new line of work with an easy-to-understand machine.

• Medium-sized packers who have already grown and benefit from the machine's flexibility. They can also process small orders and switch between different tea varieties more easily.

• Large packing operations interested in reliable machines, who know that the economic balance sheet includes many factors and who strive for long-term optimum as a key factor of cost-effective production.

• Conclusion: As a tea packer, you can only win with HST machines!