Conveyor Belt Products Guide Asgco Conveyor Solutions

Reading the Asgco Conveyor Solutions Guide

The Asgco products guide isn't some kind of mysterious document you have to decode. It's a catalog of their belting accessories and maintenance solutions, organized by product category. I've spent enough time on job sites looking through this stuff to know where people mess up when they try to use it. The guide covers their main product lines: pulley lagging (polyurethane and ceramic options), belt cleaners (primary, secondary, and scraper types), skirtboard sealing systems, belt scrapers, and various wear products. You can find it on their website or request a printed copy from a distributor. Most plant managers just download the PDF and keep it open on a second monitor during belt work.

Conveyor Belt Products Guide Asgco Conveyor Solutions

Here's the thing nobody tells you about matching these products to your application. The lagging selection chart will push you toward ceramic lagging for high-traction applications, but if your conveyor operates in wet conditions with fine, abrasive material like crushed limestone, you'll actually get better service life from a properly installed polyurethane lagging. Ceramic tiles chip out under certain impact loads. I learned that the hard way at a quarry in Ohio where a batch of ceramic lagging lasted nine months instead of the 18 months they quoted. Switched to 3/8-inch urethane ridged lagging and it hit 22 months before replacement was needed. When you're going through the guide for belt cleaners, pay attention to the mounting hardware specifications, not just the blade material. A lot of people buy the cleaner head and install it without checking whether their pulley diameter matches the spring tension requirements. I've seen primary blade assemblies installed on 24-inch pulleys where the recommended range was 30 inches minimum. The blade would ride off the face after a few weeks and you'd end up with material build-up that causes more belt damage than the carryback you were trying to stop. The skirtboard sealing section in their guide is thorough but assumes you're working with straight sections. If your transfer point has curved transitions or variable width chutes, you need to figure out the sealing geometry yourself before ordering. I had a situation at a cement plant where the standard SKD skirtboard seal kit didn't cover a 15-degree curve in the transfer housing. We ended up cutting and overlapping the urethane seals at the curve and fabricating custom bracket extensions. It worked, but it added about three hours of labor to the installation that wasn't in any of their documentation.

One counter-intuitive point about their pulley lagging products: thicker doesn't always mean longer life. Their guide shows options ranging from 3/16 inch up to 1/2 inch. The common instinct is to go thick and be done with it. What actually happens is that excessive lagging thickness changes the pulley's bending radius on the belt, which increases stress on the belt cover at the transition zone. At a sand processing facility I worked at, we went from 3/8-inch ceramic lagging to 1/2-inch because we thought it would last longer. The belt cover started developing premature cracks at the pulley interface within four months. Went back to 3/8-inch and the belt life actually improved while the lagging performance stayed the same. If you're evaluating their belt scraping products for a high-moisture application, don't skip the section on blade backing plates. The guide mentions them briefly but they matter. A worn or improperly sized backing plate will cause the rubber blade to flex unevenly, which creates chatter marks on the pulley face and reduces cleaning effectiveness. I replaced a set of secondaries that were performing poorly just by swapping out the backing plates with newer, correctly dimensioned ones. The blades themselves were fine. The whole fix took about 20 minutes per station. The guide doesn't cover everything. It won't tell you how to handle a conveyor that's been running with misalignment for years and now needs cleaning solutions that can accommodate the existing wear patterns. In those cases, you sometimes need to combine products from different sections or modify installations. Their technical support line will answer questions but they're not going to come out to your site and tell you what to do. You need to figure that part out yourself based on what you can see when you actually open up the conveyor.

I'd also note that their product numbering system can be confusing if you're ordering replacements for older installations. A lot of legacy equipment still uses part numbers from when Asgco was owned by a different parent company, and the cross-reference tables in the current guide don't always map cleanly. Keep your old part numbers handy when you pull up the new catalog. Don't assume the numbering is consistent across editions. For download, the full guide lives on the Asgco website under their resources section. It's a fairly large PDF, around 40 megabytes, so it takes a while to load on a slow connection. If you're working in a remote site with limited bandwidth, consider downloading it once and keeping a local copy. The product specs don't change often enough to justify re-downloading every time you need to look something up. What the guide also won't warn you about is how quickly lagging can lose its grip if you install it over a pulley face that has grooves worn into it from old lagging removal. You need to inspect the pulley face before applying new lagging. If there are more than 1/8 inch of material removal visible as grooves or ridges, the new lagging won't seat properly and you'll get slippage issues within the first month. Dress the pulley face or replace it. Skipping that step saves you maybe an hour of prep work and costs you a shutdown later when the belt starts slipping under load.