Most tablet defects announce their cause if you read them methodically. Here is the diagnostic order our service engineers actually use at the press.
Capping and lamination: look at air, then speed
A tablet that splits horizontally is usually trying to tell you about trapped air or over-fast compression. Check granule fines first — a spike in fines fills the die with air that has nowhere to go. Then slow the turret and add pre-compression dwell before touching the formulation; many capping problems disappear at a compression profile the product can breathe through.
Sticking and picking: surface, moisture, temperature
Product stuck to punch faces starts as a film and ends as a defect. Inspect punch surfaces for wear scratches that give material a grip, verify granule moisture against the batch record, and watch tooling temperature over the run — sticking that appears an hour into production is usually thermal, not mechanical.
Weight drift: powder flow before machine wear
When tablet weight wanders, most of the time the granulate is flowing differently than yesterday — segregation in the hopper, a bridging arch, or a fill cam set at the edge of its range. Confirm flow with a hopper-level check and a fill-depth reading before suspecting the machine. Wear in the fill cam or dosing station shows as a slow trend over weeks, not a jump between batches.
Write down what fixed it
Every resolved defect is a settings card waiting to be written: product, defect, cause, correction. Presses do not repeat mistakes — people without records do.
