Increasing the life of conveyor chain running on wear strips

Do you have conveyor chain that often runs on metal or plastic wear strips? If you do then it is important that the hardness of these surfaces and the finished condition of the conveyor chain link plates is carefully considered.

By running a chain on a metal conveyor chain wear strip, that is too hard, you will cause the conveyor chain side plates to wear quickly and thereby dramatically reduce the life of the chain. Conversely, should you be running your conveyor chain on a plastic wear strip then the life of the wear strip will be greatly increased by removing all the sharp edges of the conveyor chain link plates by surface tumbling.

What is surface tumbling?
Tumbling is a simple process where the finished conveyor chain links plates are placed in a container and 'barrelled' in a special abrasive media so that they continually rub against each other and the abrasive stones. After some time the plates will have been polished and all the sharp edges will have been removed. The illustration below shows how the sharp corners of the tumbled plates become round and smoother; which ultimately will result in much longer wear strip life.

If you would like to increase the life of plastic conveyor chain wear strips then please ask for your conveyor chain side plates to be tumbled. The potential savings in replacement wear strips, costly machine down time and engineer labour costs will be far greater than the small increase in the basic price of the 'tumbled' conveyor chain.