How to Buy a Conveyor: Questions to Ask and Quotes to Distrust

Buying a conveyor is not like buying a pump. There is no catalog page that tells you whether the conveyor will still be running in five years. Two quotes for the same line can be 30 percent apart and describe two different conveyors. Nothing on the price sheet tells you which conveyor you are getting. The questions below tell you.

Seven Questions That Separate a Builder From a Reseller

If you ask two suppliers for a 36" belt, 40 feet, 15-degree incline, one sends back a paragraph. The other sends three pages of components. The two replies are not competing quotes. First, make both suppliers fill in the same blanks. Start with these seven questions. A real builder explains all of them to you. The reason is that the builder made every one of these decisions on purpose. A reseller becomes uncomfortable at about number four.

1. What loading did you size the frame for, and what happens to tracking when it deflects?

A frame carries two loads. One is steady belt pull. The other is shock: material dropping off a chute, a lump landing in the load zone, a jam that spikes the drive. A frame sized for belt pull alone holds tension fine and still flexes when something lands on it. Flex moves pulleys and idlers out of square. Out-of-square support is a common cause of belt mistracking, as are off-center loading and uneven take-up tension. CEMA, the Conveyor Equipment Manufacturers Association, publishes installation standards. These standards require conveyor stringers to be set parallel, straight, square, and level. A frame that flexes loses all of that the first time something hits the load zone.

A good answer names the steel. It gives the plate thickness, where the load zone is reinforced, and how the frame stays square across a bolted joint. Our slider bed conveyors use a formed 3/16" plate steel frame with a 3/8" flat-bar slat bed. A sentence about heavy-duty construction is not an answer.

2. Where is the wear liner, and is it replaceable without cutting?

Wear liner is sacrificial material placed where the abrasion happens: skirtboards, chute walls, load zones, transfer points. It exists so that your material wears a bolted plate instead of the conveyor. Liners are made of mild steel, AR400 and AR500 abrasion-resistant plate, stainless, ultra-high molecular weight (UHMW) polyethylene, urethane, and ceramic. The good ones bolt on, so they can be inspected and replaced.

A good answer points to the drawing. Here is the liner. Here is the material. Here is how it comes off. A welded-in liner means torching and grinding inside a conveyor already full of your material. No liner means the wear surface is the conveyor. On a Remcon slider bed, the bed slats are the replaceable wear surface. Raised side slats seal the belt edges against glass and metal debris.

3. What top cover thickness and grade, and why that one for my material?

A belt spec is a compact string, something like 3 ply, 330 lb per inch of width (PIW), 3/16 x 1/16. The plies and the PIW rating describe the carcass and its rated pull per inch of belt width. The two fractions are top and bottom cover thickness. The cover also has a grade: ARPM Grade 1 and Grade 2 are the North American grades. Grade 1 has to meet both a higher tensile minimum and a lower maximum abrasion loss. So it is the tougher cover in both respects. It is not one side of a cut-versus-abrasion trade-off. Grade 1 is the premium cover for sharp, heavy, gouging material. Grade 2 is the general-purpose grade most suppliers stock, and it costs less.

A good answer connects the spec to your material: sharpness, lump size, drop height, and whether the belt is exposed to oil, heat, or weather. If the reply is that it comes with a rubber belt, you are being quoted a number, not a belt. Our guide to reading a conveyor belt spec explains each field.

4. How do I reach the bearings, idlers, and the tail pulley for service?

This question is where resellers have little to say, because service access is a design decision. The decision is made months before the conveyor ships, and nobody can add it afterward. Ask to see on the drawing how you reach every bearing, idler, pulley, and belt. Look for guarded access openings and room to pull a pillow block without dismantling the frame. Look for take-up travel long enough to slack the belt for a change-out. Look for clean-out points that empty the return pan without anyone crawling under a loaded conveyor.

A good answer is a walkthrough, not a promise. ASME B20.1 is the U.S. safety standard covering conveyor guarding, emergency stops, and safe maintenance access. A builder who works to it mentions it before you do.

5. What is the lead time on spare parts, and where do they ship from?

The second half of that question is the important half. Ask for the actual parts list: bearing part numbers, reducer make and model, motor frame, belt spec, and lacing type. Then ask whether you can buy those items from a distributor in your own town. If you can, you can fix a failure with a phone call. If the parts are proprietary or come from one overseas source, you have no other source and you work to somebody else's schedule.

A good answer is boring and specific. We have used shaft-mounted, v-belt-driven reducers since 1990. One reason is that these reducers are so widely used in sand, rock, gravel, and mining service that dealers stock them. Our bearings are the common pillow block style, and the threaded parts of our take-ups can be bought at a local fastener supply. We supply replacement parts for the life of the conveyor.

6. Can you repair it, or only sell me a new one?

A company that has to fix its own machines builds them differently. The company knows which weld gets cut open at year four and which bearing nobody can reach without a torch. A company that only sells never gets that feedback from the plant floor.

A good answer includes a repair history. Remcon repairs and refurbishes used equipment, replaces belts, and moves and reconfigures whole systems, including equipment we did not build. If you are comparing an existing machine with a new one, our repair or replace guide explains the decision.

7. Who answers the phone at 2am when it is down?

Prefer the honest answer to the flattering one. A support queue with a ticket number is an answer. A person who has the drawing on their desk and remembers welding the conveyor is a different answer. Both are legitimate. You need to know which one you bought before the night you need it.

What Is Deleted to Reach That Price

A quote 30 percent under everyone else is rarely generosity. That quote comes from a company that removed things. Here is what the company removes first.

None of it shows on day one. All of it shows by month six. The belt is the line item that buyers check, so it is usually quoted honestly. The frame, the liners, and the spares plan are where the cost was cut.

Domestic vs. Imported

The import wins on upfront cost, and that is the whole list. Domestic wins on parts that you get this week instead of this quarter. A domestic conveyor also wins on a frame built for your actual conditions. It also wins on a person who answers the phone when the conveyor is down.

The comparison above is not a claim about how well anything is built overseas. Plenty of imported equipment is made well. The comparison is a claim about lead time, spares logistics, and fit for conditions.

• Lead time on parts. Ocean transit from Asia to a U.S. West Coast port commonly takes a couple of weeks from port to port. This transit time is before customs clearance and inland freight. East and Gulf Coast routings take longer. That time starts only once the part is made and booked.
• Component standards. Imported machinery often arrives with IEC-frame motors and metric shafting, while North American distributors stock NEMA frames and inch sizes. Installing a NEMA motor on an IEC mount is not a swap. The nearest pair may have nearly the same shaft height, but shaft diameter, keyway, and foot bolt pattern all differ.
• Fit for conditions. A machine built for a general export market is built for average conditions. Your load zone, your lump size, your ceiling height, and your winter are not average.
• Funding rules. If the project uses federal dollars, Build America, Buy America domestic content preferences may apply to iron, steel, and manufactured products. Before you compare prices, confirm this with your funding source.

For light, clean duty (a short transfer moving cartons or dry product in a dry building), an imported conveyor can be exactly right. We will say so. For heavy abrasive duty, the math reverses by a wide margin once you count downtime and a parts wait measured in weeks.

How Remcon Quotes It

Remcon does not sell catalog or stock conveyors. Every conveyor is quoted for the job, so we start with the material and the stream, the throughput, and the length and width. We also start with the infeed and discharge heights, and with whether it loads from a pit or sits above the floor. You do not need a finished spec. Photos of the space and a hand sketch are enough to start. When a third-party screen or separator is the right answer for part of a line, we integrate it rather than pretend we make everything. If a simpler, less expensive conveyor will do the job, we tell you that too.

We have built heavy-duty recycling equipment since 1977. We fabricate, ship, and install nationwide from Airway Heights, Washington, with our own installation crews. To get all seven questions answered for a specific machine, send us the job. You can also read more about the shop first.

Buying a Conveyor FAQ