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 machine will still be running in five years. Two quotes for the same line can land 30 percent apart and describe two completely different machines, and nothing on the price sheet tells you which one you are getting. The questions below do.

Seven Questions That Separate a Builder From a Box-Shifter

Ask two suppliers for a 36" belt, 40 feet, 15-degree incline, and one sends back a paragraph while the other sends three pages of components. Those are not competing quotes. Make both fill in the same blanks first, starting with these seven. A real builder walks you through all of them, because they made every one of these decisions on purpose. A reseller gets uncomfortable right around 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, and out-of-square support is a classic cause of belt mistracking, right alongside off-center loading and uneven take-up tension. CEMA, the Conveyor Equipment Manufacturers Association, publishes installation standards requiring conveyor stringers to be set parallel, straight, square, and level. A frame that flexes gives all of that back the first time the load zone takes a hit.

A good answer names the steel. Plate thickness, where the load zone is reinforced, how the frame stays square across a bolted joint. Remcon's 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 your material eats a bolted plate instead of the machine. Liners are made in mild steel, AR400 and AR500 abrasion-resistant plate, stainless, UHMW, urethane, and ceramic, and the good ones bolt on so they can be inspected and swapped.

A good answer points at 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 machine already full of your material. No liner means the wear surface is the machine. On a Remcon slider bed the bed slats are the replaceable wear surface, and 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 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. Over that sits a cover 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 on both counts, not one side of a cut-versus-abrasion tradeoff. 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 sees 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 walks through each field.

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

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

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, and a builder who works to it raises 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, a failure is a phone call. If the parts are proprietary or come from one overseas source, you are a captive customer on somebody else's schedule.

A good answer is boring and specific. Remcon has used shaft-mounted, v-belt-driven reducers since 1990 partly because they 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 machine.

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

A company that has to fix its own machines builds them differently. They know 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 weighing an existing machine against a new one, our repair or replace guide lays out the decision.

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

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

What Got Deleted to Hit That Number

A quote 30 percent under everyone else is rarely generosity. It is a company that removed things. Here is what goes first.

None of it shows on day one. All of it shows by month six. The belt is the line buyers check, so it usually gets quoted honestly. The frame, the liners, and the spares plan are where the money came out.

Domestic vs. Imported

The import wins on upfront cost, and that is the whole list. Domestic wins on parts you get this week instead of this quarter, a frame built for your actual conditions, and a person who picks up when it is down.

That is not a claim about how well anything is built overseas. Plenty of imported equipment is made well. It 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 runs a couple of weeks port to port before customs clearance and inland freight, and East and Gulf Coast routings run longer. That clock 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. Dropping a NEMA motor onto an IEC mount is not a swap. The nearest pair may sit at 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. Confirm that with your funding source before you compare prices.

For light, clean duty — a short transfer moving cartons or dry product in a dry building — an imported unit can be exactly right, and we will say so. For heavy abrasive duty the math flips hard once you count downtime and a parts wait measured in weeks.

How Remcon Quotes It

Remcon does not sell catalog or stock units. Every machine is quoted for the job, so we start with the material and the stream, the throughput, the length and width, the infeed and discharge heights, and 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. And when a simpler, less expensive conveyor will do the job, we tell you that too.

We have built heavy-duty recycling equipment since 1977, and 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 — or read more about the shop first.

Buying a Conveyor FAQ