Shop-floor trivia: McD went chainwide on two-sided grills around ’99 with Made For You, doing 10:1 patties in about 45 seconds at about 350°F with top-platen interlocks — did anyone beat them to it, and was it a Taylor two-sided or a Garland XPress in those early installs? I’m comparing maintenance logs for actuator lifespans and how much the shorter open-platen window cut burn incidents.
Check Taylor L-series manual — actuator cycle rating’s listed; at ‘350°F’, interlock timing matters.
In our MFY pilot in late ’98 we had Taylor two‑sided units, and I didn’t see a Garland XPress in our region until the mid‑2000s. One thing that stretched actuator life at “about 350°F” was re‑shimming the top‑platen pads so compression stayed in spec; once the pads packed down, the interlock hit too hard and the drive took a beating. Do your logs note pad swaps or measured compression?
Don’t think anyone beat McD chainwide; first I saw elsewhere was Wendy’s around ’01–02 with Taylor, and XPress didn’t land here till mid‑’00s. For actuator life at “about 350°F,” the gain wasn’t the shorter open‑platen window so much as weekly rail/lift‑screw lube and swapping to high‑temp PTFE bushings — gave us about 25–30% longer. @carolh92 did you track cycle counts against platen dwell time?
From what I saw, McD was first at scale with “Made For You”; I only ran into two‑sided pilots in SoCal in ’97–’98, and XPress didn’t hit my markets until later. If you’ve got photos or data plates, decode the Taylor serials to pin build years and note early L‑series lift assemblies to align your maintenance notes. Not counting the dorm‑room Foreman, I’m curious what region your logs are from.
Looked like Taylor in those early MFY fits — the giveaway was the split platen pads and the little magnet interlock on the right hinge, not an XPress faceplate. At “about 45 seconds at about 350°F” we stretched actuators by one‑notch spring preload and swapping PTFE release sheets every 4 hours so the top would not chatter. Shortening the open‑platen window cut burns but spiked cycle counts, and that’s what ate the actuators.
But > not chatter. Shortening the open‑platen window cut burns but spiked cycle counts, and that’s what ate the actuators. We tamed that by setting a 2.0 mm top-gap shim on 10:1 and adding a 1‑sec dwell at top so the next drop didn’t force a full cycle — MTBF went from about 8 to about 14 months, though it cost about 2–3 sec; are you logging gap and dwell in those notes?