Once the machine had arrived at our workshop the belt and hydraulic drive was removed from the conveyor chassis to fully inspect the damage. From this it was clear the it wouldn’t be a case of straightening the distorted section and it would have to be replaced. Due to its position close to the heel of the conveyor it was decided to strip the chassis off the machine completely and remanufacture the damaged section.

The chassis was partially cut to allow us to align the heel with the ram mounting points and jigged, once the new section was cut we used this jig to guarantee that the alignment would be the same as when the machine was new.

As a matter of course after seeing the wear to the pins and pin holes the chassis mounting bosses and pins were replaced along with the ram bottoms to increase service life and decrease the stresses as the conveyor folds out.

After reassembly and testing it was clear there was also a underlying fault causing the conveyor to fold out slowly and not complete the full movement to lock into place, after investigating and testing we had eliminated the problem to one of the hydraulic rams, as a zero cost proof of concept the rams were swapped with the other side, one at a time to isolate the problem. One the malfunctioning ram was found the ram was removed from the guards, stripped and found to have a slight bend in the rod itself. A new rod was machined, ram serviced and resealed and refitted to the conveyor eliminating the problem.