Designing a non-powered conveyor

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Thread Starter

harold

I would like to eliminate the bending over that employees in the packaging area are going through during packaging and sealing bags placed on the floor. I would like to design a simple conveyor which is non-powered and can easily transport the bags with little handling involved. My request is design details needed to achieve this.

velasih @ boltnail. co. zw
 
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Michael Griffin

I would guess that you are looking for a roller or skatewheel conveyor. You might need some other kind though, depending upon the nature of the bags being handled. You might also need to put the bags on pallets (which might be just sheets of thick plywood cut to size) to get them to roll on the conveyors properly.

You need to talk to conveyor vendors in your area and show them what you want to do. They will normally assemble the conveyor to order according to the actual dimensions that you need. The rollers themselves come in various standard sizes but lengths, bracketry, number of leg sets, etc. have to be assembled to suit. I would recommend against buying the bits and pieces and trying to assemble it yourself. I've seen people try a do-it-yourself approach, but getting everything to work smoothly is harder than it looks.

What you need to do first is to draw a scale diagram of the floor layout of the new work area with the material flow that you want. It should show everything, including where people will be working, work tables, where any machines are located, where incoming material (items being packed, empty bags, etc.) are stored, directly of material flow, lift truck access aisles, etc. If you don't do this, you won't get what you need.

I would suggest starting with a rough sketch, talk to some local vendors to see what they have and what it costs, and then make a final floor layout and ask them for quotes.

The following is a link to a vendor who is in my area. http://www.rolmasterconveyors.ca/ You can use this as a reference to get an idea of what is available, but you need to find someone who is more local to you. A search on Google for "roller conveyor" should turn up some links.
 
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