Felipe Velasco

Are you referring to maintenance of conveyors or in a production sense? What type of product are you conveying and at what capacity? Belt size range?

Your question is very loose.

If you could be more specific you will probably get a more productive answer.

Regards

Gary Blenkhorn ■

Felipe

Any maintenance program would be specific to the operation. I don't know of any one document that would be in general.

Many manufacturers will give you recommended maintenance for their particular product. I would start with a belt manufacturer's recommended maintenance. IE,

http://www.scandura.net/technical/index.html

and check out the care and maintenance sections as well as the troubleshooting section.

I am sure Goodyear have a similar section on their site.

Then you can do the same with the idlers, pulleys, bearings, scrapers, etc.

Everyone uses different type of ways to drive a conveyor so this could go on forever. Monitoring gearbox temperature and oil sample analysis are good preventative maintenance checks.

Monitoring roller bearing temperature during a preventative maintenance check. Infra red scanning is probably the best way to go.

Hope this helps,

Gary Blenkhorn ■

Creating a generic maintenance program for conveyor systems has been a life long process for many companies and individuals and frankly if done well is a very valuable piece of IP. There are many very good handboooks which give you a starting point but as I found, the more you work with clients, the more you realise to what extent maintenance skill levels have deteriorated over the years on sites. The consequence is many companies are outsourcing this responsibility but this in itself solves nothing if the skill levels and understanding of the maintenance requirements are not addressed.

What we see on most sites is work being done over and over again with no understanding how, through root cause analysis, this work could be eliminated. The reason no analysis is done is the maintenance personnel do not have the materials handling training to do the analysis. I say this as you have two choices in your approach, do the work to a routine without thinking (very safe as most do it this way) or try to make a difference by taking a professional approach. The second line of attack starts in my opinion with training of you and your people and through this training you will create techniques that distinguishes what you do from others. ■