Our client as this heavy machine and is too big for sales to drag around to ... trade shows

Reminds me of one such behemot that on the way to a trade show fell off the truck. We did some nominal sheet metal straightening and made the banged up machine work and exhibited it. This was the best seller ever [if it can fall of a truck and still work, it must be good].
Since customs is not very cooperative to rush there was no time to get spare parts, a lot of ingenuity went into getting it to run e.g. we used 'home made' 1 ohm power resistors and replaced some things with local store 'equivalents'.

Erik