Flipping Chain - Extends Life?

[hkim310]

Does flipping the conveyor chain extend the life of the chain? Has anyone done this before and can they confirm that they go added life from the chain? What would you say the average life of a chain is 400,000-500,000 cars?

 

[rph9168]

It does extend the life of the chain as long as you have also done all the other scheduled chain maintenance. We used to get over 800,000 vehicles or more but the owner was meticulous in maintaining the chain and doing weekly scheduled maintenance. We kept written records on all except weekly maintenance. We used to flip the chains annually which might have been a bit excessive but I think it helped. All of our washes did 150,000+ washes annually. We had six washes and in three years I only remember two chain breaks and one of those was caused by a heavy pickup that locked its wheels on the conveyor. That was twenty years ago so I cannot speak for today's conveyor chains.

 

[Ric]

It does help. Keeping the chain clean also helps. Car count is not a good measure to use...a chain running 8 hours per day could wash 200 or 1200 cars per day. In both cases the chain made the same number of revolutions. There may be a bit more wear on a loaded chain...but you get my point.

 

[Earl Weiss]

It will extend the life. The answer is how much. The Old Flapan conveyrs had a much heavier chain than the AVWs which we now use a "348" Chain with . Jack Flapan said we shoud get 500K cars out of a chain but we never got over 400K As noted above it's not just the car volume but time on the chain that matters.

With the new lighter chain it's about 250K cars but it's much cheaper and lighter / easier to work with. Flipping involves substantial time / labor because each roller needs to be removed and re installed. This could be 45 + Rollers. So, you need to weigh the labor cost versus cost of extending the live by about 1/3. If a Chain is $3000 delivered and you extend life by about 1/3 in theory that is a $1000 savings. If you can get it done with $600.00 in labor you saved $400.00 .

Me, I'd rather have the new more dependable chain.

 

[Earl Weiss]

.................... the owner was meticulous in maintaining the chain and doing weekly scheduled maintenance. ..........................

Out of curiosity what was the maintenance? I recall in the olden days Chain oilers. There were also heavy surface log chains. Talk about breaking a chain or something else if the vehicle wheels locked with a chain attached.

Recently had a customer say we must have damaged the Black plastic dealer license plate frame when we hooked the chain on. I asked him how old he was.

 

[rph9168]

Weekly we checked the cotter pins on the chain for wear and replaced anything that looked like it could break. We also adjusted the tension when necessary replace links and rollers. Our washes did between 15,000 to 20,000 washes a month so the chains got a lot of wear and tear. Our conveyors were the old style that had continuous rollers so the rollers took a beating when they sometimes were driven over. We flipped the chains annually on a rainy day. It was a real pain in the a$$. We had our own shop and mechanics that worked on them when they needed more serious attention than scheduled maintenance. I am not sure but I think they were all old Flapans.

 

[Earl Weiss]

................... Our conveyors were the old style that had continuous rollers so the rollers took a beating when they sometimes were driven over.

Old style? You are the master of the understatement!

 

[Ric]

Old style? You are the master of the understatement!

I had had one those also. It was surface mounted and used log chain.

 

[Earl Weiss]

Some of the first over unders had only top and bottom tracks and a chain on each side. What a headache.

 

[rph9168]

I remember always thinking to myself when we were doing maintenance on the conveyor that there has to be a better way. Glad to hear there has been some improvements over the years.

 

[Earl Weiss]

The only time in recent year when I felt it was worth it to flip a chain was when I was going to change a bunch of rollers anyway so the incremental labor was nominal.

Other than that, no flipping - no maintenance other than periodically removing links as it stretches. With the old Flapans having cotter pins I would have to check them to replace missing ones every couple of weeks. Don't know what maintenance I would do if I wanted to.

 

[rph9168]

It was not like we had a choice to flip the chain. It was not my favorite maintenance chore. The owner decided that for us. It was essentially an all day chore and it was usually raining when we did it which made it an even more undesirable job. Since we had to take all the rollers off we usually put all new ones on and kept the decent ones for spares. Believe me if it was my choice I probably would have done it but not every year as we had to.