I would say they have their weaknesses.
The covertape is wound around a spool which consists of two FR4 discs (one with teeth) held together with magnets sandwiching teflon sheets and a nylon spacer, the whole thing acts like a very simple clutch. During use bits of tape glue and other crap get into that clutch mechanism and changes the tension applied to the covertape. In addition the surfaces of the magnet and the steel insert in its opposing disc get too close each other given enough time and use and start to wear, at this point the slip tension can become enough to indexes the feeder forwards revealing a part when it shouldn't or at least moving it out of sync (at worst spilling crap loads of your parts onto the floor). Because they work in banks of up to 10 lanes per feeder one covertape motor drives all lanes at once so a dodgy tension in spool 10 can mean components being picked in lanes 1-9 make lane 10 slip.
The nylon spacer has a groove it it holding a small metal toothy but to give some grip on the cover tape, over time that causes the spacer to split and the tooth to drop out. (I'm not saying it happens a lot).
That teflon sheet of course wears, easy enough to replace but on some of mine I replaced it with a random plastic shim and that lasted longer, I wonder about the material choice. Like most custom Essemtec parts, official spares are frankly inexcusably priced.
Banked feeders like CLM mean most of the lanes are inaccessible without taking them apart, now and then tapes will curl up inside the feeder instead of feeding through (plastic or spliced typically), they are also use seriously complex mechanism for the feeder advance. I haven't dared attempt to take that section apart, but I have only had one or two go faulty, nevertheless I suspect its still a job best left to someone with a manual & a jig. While not a durability issue, banked feeders in general are not ideal, as you run through multiple jobs your parts start to get spread out across the feeders becoming less and less optimal and if you need to service one because of faulty lane you lose 10 while its out of commission.
In theory HyQ feeders are being made cheaper as their prohibitive price was keeping CLM alive when it was really supposed to be a legacy option for existing Essemtec users, in fact even the "budget" CLM feeders were becoming rather closer in price per lane to some expensive rival systems than you might expect. On a machine like a Puma or Paraquda using CLM feeders costs you ~25% placement speed as they can only advance 4mm once every 0.7seconds or so, the head can obviously pick much quicker than that, HyQ are 3 times quicker.
Now my CLM feeders are getting a little longer in the tooth I certainly wouldn't trust them with 0201 and we haven't worked them that hard, assuming a roughly even usage across the whole lot they have fed only ~150k/lane. Not even the sales or maintenance guys believe they can handle the claimed 01005.
They connect via 25 pin D-Sub, not really something intended for multiple insertions, those are connected to removable ribbons but on the machine side they are not fun to get at if they need replacing.
Plusses :
Really dense lane count
Actually pretty good at handling short strips even tho' I don't think its by design.
I've only had one total failure and two erratic function issues in 8 years so they can't be terrible. (one was a sensor failure, I'm not sure the erratic one could be explained and the other I haven't had repaired because sending erratic things off is a crapshoot in any industry)
The per lane cost (IIRC) stays roughly the same regardless of the lane widths in the cassette, by contrast rivals gun feeders tend to get more and more ridiculous in price the more uncommon the width.
On the robot side, I don't see any reason so far why it couldn't last 20 years, its a solid platform and I don't think there are any obvious points of failure you couldn't fix by simple replacing the part as long as you had access to a calibration kit. What would catch you would be availability of electronics just like anything else, if one of the drive controllers or something went EOL and yours died, that could be a pickle. I did ask if there was an expected EOL date for the Paraquda but apparently they tend not to do that to their machines, they remain supported as long as you can pay to fix them. Go back to pre-FLX era Essemtec machines and I can believe they don't last 20 years so if you found one of them mouldering somewhere, I'd avoid it.
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