Superior's sealed idlers go standard, and Texas river rock finds buyers
Frank AggregateSuperior made its sealed idler standard on Monday, and a Texas sand and gravel producer found buyers for river rock it used to treat as waste.
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Chief Engineer, Conveyor Components · Superior Industries
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Plant Manager · Texas Aggregates
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Screening Expert · Polydeck
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Superior makes its sealed idler standard
Superior says its Titanium seal makes idlers last at least 25% longer than other common rolls, and it now comes on every Superior idler except CEMA B.
On Monday Superior Industries made its Titanium seal standard on all of its conveyor idlers except CEMA B rolls, six years after launching it as a premium option. "Conveyor roll failures almost always come down to a failed bearing," says Paul D. Schmidgall, Superior's chief engineer of conveyor components, and the seal is the bearing's only defense against moisture and dust. In the field, a Vulcan plant in Tennessee running up to three million tons a year had not replaced a single sealed idler after a year, and Capital Sand in Missouri, which used to find failing rolls on nearly every inspection, still had its replacements turning more than a year later.
Read Superior's idler announcement
29 new operations opened in the third quarter
The busiest quarter this year, and mostly stone. Texas alone opened twelve.
| Around Lueders, Texas, north of Abilene | Four limestone pits |
| Permian Basin, Texas and New Mexico | Four crushed stone sites |
| Cookeville, Wartburg and Erwin, Tennessee | Two sandstone quarries, one limestone plant |
| Ohio and Missouri | Two limestone, two sand and gravel |
| Fourteen more, from New York to Oregon | Mostly sand and gravel |
After a first half that ran 21 sand and gravel sites to 9 stone, the third quarter turned to rock: 18 of its 29 new operations are quarries or stone plants. Texas opened twelve, four of them in the limestone country around Lueders and three in the Permian Basin, where an oilfield services company also set up a crusher across the line in New Mexico. Every one is an independent, while the national producers keep growing by buying quarries.
Watch: why one plant keeps spare screen panels on hand (89 seconds)
Polydeck's Richard Clanton at a plant whose new deposit runs much dirtier than the old one. Wire on the bottom decks kept blinding, and flexible rubber panels stayed clean.
On Thursday Polydeck posted an 89 second video from a customer visit with Richard Clanton, one of its screening experts. The plant used to dig a clean alluvial deposit; that pit ran out, and the rock now coming down from the canyon is much dirtier. The wire cloth on the bottom decks of two screens kept blinding over until Polydeck put in flexible rubber panels, which stayed clean. The reason for the visit was the plant's spares. "We use inventory as a strategic weapon," he says, "to keep the emergencies to a minimum."
River rock that used to be waste, now sold as aggregate
Texas Aggregates rented a mobile jaw crusher to break down oversized river rock that had almost no resale value, and now sells it as aggregate.
Last Friday Powerscreen Texas published a case study from Texas Aggregates, a sand and gravel producer in Smithville that has run since 2002, now has four locations and ships from Austin to Houston. Oversized river rock coming into the operation was hard to handle and almost impossible to sell. Since renting a Powerscreen Premiertrak 400X jaw crusher, the Smithville plant crushes it into aggregate it sells to private and commercial customers, and the hydraulic setting adjustment holds the product to customer specifications. Plant manager Colby Smith credits the dealer's parts team, down the road in La Grange, with having parts ready, often the same day.
Read the Texas Aggregates case study
When coarse corrugated jaw dies earn their place
Fewer, wider teeth with deep valleys let fines fall through the chamber, which matters most when there is no scalper or the scalper is not keeping up.
On Monday Southern Machinery, a Metso dealer in Tennessee, walked through Metso's coarse corrugated jaw dies for Nordberg C Series crushers, cast in XT715, the first manganese alloy Metso developed specifically for jaw crushers. The wide valleys give fines room to pass instead of packing the chamber, and the rounded teeth grip slabby or slippery feed. Metso's own leaflet names where the profile pays: a lot of fines, feed that breaks into slabs, and no scalper or one that is not working well. The fixed and movable dies are designed as a pair, so they go in as a matched set.
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