How long does judgement take in a repair loop?

Answer: 3 working days from the moment intake closes, excluding time spent waiting for customer photos. Anything overdue escalates to the service lead.

How long can a crack be before replacement?

Answer: 80 mm. Beyond that the crack usually crosses 2 ribs, repaired strength does not return, and reshelling costs more than a new case.

Who pays return freight?

Answer: 70 percent us and 30 percent the customer in warranty, reversed out of warranty. Round-trip freight is 96 CNY per case.

Is a repaired case still under warranty?

Answer: Yes, limited to the repaired area and the remaining term. A replacement does not restart the warranty clock.

Repair Loop: Receive, Judge, Return

Quick answer: A repair loop runs intake, judgement and return: 8 intake fields, 3 working days to judge, cracks over 80 mm replaced, freight split 70:30.

Intake Starts the Repair Loop
Judgement Inside Three Working Days
The 80 mm Line
Return Shipping and the 70:30 Split
Where Twelve Days Come From
FAQ

1. Intake Starts the Repair Loop

Disputes about a repair loop rarely start on the shop floor; they start three months later, when nobody can prove what arrived. A thin intake record leaves judgement with nothing to stand on.

The intake sheet carries 8 fixed fields: case model, 10-digit serial, arrival date, exterior photos, accessories received, the fault as described, the customer order number, and the sender's contact. The 2 most skipped are accessories and photos, and those are the 2 that settle arguments.

The serial is not decorative. Its first 2 digits are the production year, the third is the line number, digits four to six are the mould number, and the last four are the batch sequence. Read all 10 and you can trace which mould ran the shell, which day the resin arrived, and which supplier shipped the latches. Half the evidence in a repair loop comes from that string, not from an email.

Three photos are enough: the whole case, the fault, and a close-up of the serial.

Stage	Time limit	Document out
Intake	1 working day after arrival	Repair ticket, arrival photos
Judgement	3 working days	Verdict sheet: repair, replace or decline
Return	Shipped within 3 days	Return note, re-check record

2. Judgement Inside Three Working Days

Judgement is not a look-and-see. It routes every case into one of 3 exits: repairable, converted to replacement, or declined with return. Each exit carries a different responsible party, quotation basis and shipping method. The 3 working days start when intake closes; time spent waiting for customer material does not count.

Repair loop judgement bay: grey cases stacked on a green floor while four workers assemble and check at benches

Four areas get checked: shell, sealing face, hardware and liner. The shell is read for cracks and distortion, the sealing face for an unbroken witness line, the hardware for latch effort and rivet looseness, the liner for crumbling foam. Every verdict sheet carries 3 items: conclusion, evidence, liability. Liability splits into manufacturing defect, user damage and transit damage. That call decides whether the job is chargeable, a separate question from how freight splits later.

Time limit	Clock starts	If it runs over
3 working days	Intake closed	Escalate to service lead, verdict same day
24 hours	Verdict issued	No reply means repair is scheduled
5 working days	Quotation issued	Held in storage, returned as-is after 30 days

Most delay sits in missing material. Without one sharp photo, nobody signs off as repairable, because a repair that cracks again becomes that engineer's problem. Photo templates for common models cut the exchange from 5 days to 1. Judgement draws the most complaints in the whole repair loop, and the reason is speed rather than accuracy.

3. The 80 mm Line

Crack length is the hardest rule in the repair loop: up to 80 mm the case is repairable, beyond 80 mm it becomes a reshell. The reason is cost, not craft. A crack under 80 mm needs cleaning, patching and dressing, about 1.5 hours of labour and 45 CNY in parts, and freight still leaves the job worth doing. Past 80 mm the crack usually crosses 2 ribs, and repaired strength never returns.

Reshelling has its own arithmetic: 38 screws to strip, 118 CNY for the shell, 2.5 hours of labour. Add the three and the total passes the factory price of a new case. That cost line is where 80 mm comes from, and it has nothing to do with wall thickness.

Measurement has to be uniform: take the longest straight distance along the crack, and where it branches, measure each leg once and keep the longer.

Lay the case flat and close the lid first. An open lid lets the shell spring back and readings come out 3 to 5 mm short. Use a steel rule rather than a tape, because play in a tape hook is enough to flip the verdict at this scale. Write the number on the verdict sheet with a photo of the rule in place.

4. Return Shipping and the 70:30 Split

Return does not mean dropping the case into a carton. A repaired unit passes 5 re-checks: latch effort, sealing-face flatness, valve pressure hold, handle riveting and colour match. All 5 must pass before packing, which follows the new-case standard: foam corner guards, a 5-ply corrugated outer, and void fill until nothing shifts.

Repair loop staging: woven bags of beige resin on a pallet, two dark mould blocks and white injection machines behind

Freight splits 70:30. In-warranty repairs put 70 percent on us and 30 on the customer; out of warranty flips the ratio. Round-trip freight is costed at 96 CNY per case, a weighted average across 320 repairs a year including one outbound and one return leg. The point is not the money. Whoever pays everything under-claims, whoever pays nothing over-claims.

Document	Signed by	Travels with the case
Repair ticket	Intake clerk	Stays in the system
Verdict sheet	Judgement engineer	One copy in the box
Re-check record	Re-check technician	Enclosed on return
Return note	Dispatch clerk	Returned signed

Incomplete paperwork gets refused at the customer's warehouse. Receiving checks 3 things: note number, case count and exterior condition. When those do not match, the case waits in the bay for email, and that costs another 4 days.

5. Where Twelve Days Come From

Twelve days breaks down as 3 days outbound transit, 1 day intake, 3 days judgement, 1 day queueing, 1 day repair and 3 days return transit. The 6 blocks add up to exactly 12, and any slip pushes the loop back. Transit is the least controllable half of a repair loop, so the lever for cycle time sits in transport choice rather than on the shop floor.

Of 320 repairs a year, 18 percent are judged unrepairable, roughly 58 cases converted to replacement. That ratio reads as a maturity signal: a first-year product often runs above 25 percent, and a settled structure with stable tooling lands near 15.

Once the repair loop runs clean, verdict sheets get terse: one conclusion, one line of evidence, one signature.

Conclusion

A repair loop earns its value from records, not speed: 8 intake fields, 3 working days for judgement, 5 re-checks before return. The 80 mm line separates repair from replacement, and the 70:30 split pulls both sides toward an honest call. Fix those 4 points and the 12-day cycle means something. At 320 repairs a year with 18 percent unrepairable, the numbers drift down as the structure settles.