Episode 41: Precision Pulley & Idler (PPI) talks wing pulley basics

On this episode of “Drilling Deeper,” PPI’s Allen Mathes joins P&Q managing editor Jack Kopanski to provide insights into the latest developments in the pulley market, the basics of wing pulley use and the history of PPI’s pulley designs.

 Mathes, a sales manager at PPI, kicks off the conversation by diving into the “when” and “why” of wing pulley use. He explains the benefits wing pulleys provide, specifically outlining the way wing pulleys prevent damage to the tail side of belts.

He goes on to explain what has made angled wings so popular of late. Some of the most desirable traits angled wings offer, as Mathes says, are their ability to self-clean as they spin, better tracking as they treat a belt more like a drum pulley, less noise and vibration, and less obstruction.

Later in the interview, Mathes shares how the modern-day PPI herringbone wing (HBW) pulley came to be. The initial design of the HBW came in an effort to tackle the aforementioned issues. PPI offers a broad range of HBW pulleys, with its traditional offering featuring a drum pulley base, and another version that has a round contact bar welded to the top of it. From there, customers sought out smaller versions of the company’s pulleys and PPI responded with another version – the plate herringbone wing – that also features a contact bar welded to the wing. Larger versions are also available.

Mathes then compares the traditional HBW pulley and the plate wing pulley and outlines when an operator might be better served by one than the other. One deciding factor is the diameter differences between HBW and plate wing pulleys and the resulting wear rates.

As successful as PPI has been with its pulleys to this point, the company is always looking to improve. Mathes says PPI is continually working to identify different problems and how it can solve them. He also shares the range of products PPI offers to serve numerous purposes. As he puts it, “anything that the best touches on a belt conveyor, that’s what we do.”

There is plenty of valuable information in this episode. You won’t want to miss it!

For 108 years, Pit & Quarry magazine has been the premier monthly aggregate processing information source. Through multiple platforms, we deliver the very latest in equipment and technology news and information that is critical for safely achieving the highest level of efficiency and profitability. Editors Kevin Yanik and Jack Kopanski cover the market in print, online and through e-newsletters. As respected industry insiders, they moderate the annual Pit & Quarry Roundtable & Conference and speak at industry conferences and meetings.

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Transcript

Jack Kopanski: Hello, welcome into this episode of Drilling Deeper. I am Jack Kopanski, managing editor of Pit & Quarry and co-host of Drilling Deeper. Today, we will hear from Allen Mathes, sales manager at PPI. I sat down with Allen on the show floor of AGG1 to talk a little bit about what the company has going on.

In this episode, you’ll learn when and why wing pulleys are used, why angled wing pulleys have become so popular and the many factors that feed into that popularity, the history of PPI’s herringbone wing pulley and much more. So, without further ado, let’s hand it over to Allen Mathes.

Interview Starts

JK: Welcome in to this episode of Drilling Deeper today, we are joined by Allen Mathes, outside sales manager at PPI. Allen, thanks so much for making a little time for us today.

Allen Mathes: Well, I appreciate it. Thanks for having me again. My name is Allen Mathes. I’ve been with PPI for just over 13 years, and I’ve had a couple sales territories through that time period. Currently, I live in Pella, Iowa, where our headquarters is, and I cover all of Iowa and all of Minnesota, that’s my territory.

JK: Excellent, excellent. Sort of all over the place, a little bit.

AM: Anywhere you want to see in Iowa and Minnesota.

JK: Excellent.

AM:Those warm places.

JK: Yeah, as a Clevelander, I get it. I get it. Yeah, you know, excited to have you here today. A lot of good stuff that PPI is working with. Excited to be having this conversation at AGG1. Obviously, a lot of development and excitement going on here. And PPI is certainly no different. So, just to kind of get into it, you guys are obviously big in the wing pulley world. Can you just kind of give a little explanation for those that are listening that maybe aren’t as familiar with the wing pulley? You know, when and why wing pulleys are used?

AM: Absolutely. Originally, wing pulleys were designed to put in the, generally the tail location of a conveyor, so as carryback falls down the return side of the belt, or down into the belt, it doesn’t get trapped between the drum pulley and the belt. Because you don’t want to damage your belt, that’s the most expensive component on your conveyor. And the idea of them is they’re built with gussets and hubs and wings that make contact with the belt. And as material comes in, it has a space to go, and it kind of turns around in that area. And when the pulley stops, it’s supposed to kind of slide out the gussets and be gone. So that’s where kind of the history of a traditional style straight wing pulley came from.

JK: Yeah, absolutely. So you kind of explained a little bit, you know, sort of not wanting to damage the belt, keeping them at the tail of the conveyor. What has made angled wings become so popular recently in the industry?

AM: Well, there’s a number of features and benefits for an angled wing pulley over the traditional straight wing. One is the angled wings create some centrifugal force as it spins around, and it actually actively cleans itself. It’s not waiting for that material to churn around and stop and kind of fall out the gussets. Because if you have sticky material or any kind of buildup in there, that doesn’t always happen anyway. So as that pulley is turning, it actually is throwing that material out.

JK: Excellent.

AM: Among some other benefits, it’s got a radius crown on both sides, so it really helps the belt track much better as well. It treats your belt more like a drum pulley, because with the angled wings, you get at least four constant points of contact across the face of the pulley instead of hitting every wing, and you get the thump, thump, thump, thump, thump as you go around, which is not as good on your belt. So as far as treating your belt like a drum, very good on your splice that’s rolling through that herringbone wing or angled wing style pulley. It’s much better for your belt. And again, that’s always the thing we’re trying to take care of, is keep that belt running as long as you can.

JK: Yeah, absolutely. Now, as someone that, I’ve been with Pit & Quarry about three and a half years, still relatively new to the industry, I’m still learning a lot of stuff. For someone like myself that maybe doesn’t think about this impact, I understand that angled wings are also better from a noise and vibration standpoint, you kind of talked about not having that sort of like having that sort of like thunk, thunk, thunk, thunk, thunk. You know, you might not think noise is a super big issue on a site when you’ve got crushers and screens and everything going, but can you talk about the benefits of sort of having that less noise and vibration on the belt and the pulley?

AM: Sure. There’s a lot of locations that we deal with where there’s a quarry right on the edge of a town or right in town, and every tail pulley you have creates that additional noise and that can make a big difference going to a herringbone wing, because it is a large difference in the noise that creates. By the way it rolls around that more like a drum than it does over that straight wing.

JK: Absolutely. So PPI, known for its herringbone wing pulley specifically, obviously, sort of a very well known piece of equipment in the industry and in the pulley world. Can you kind of give me a little bit of history as far as how the herringbone wing pulley came to be and how it’s kind of become such a staple product for PPI?

AM: Yes. The reason we started to design a herringbone wing in the first place was because of the issues we talked about a little earlier, where we wanted something to take better care of your belt, to treat it more like a drum, to actively clean. That’s where we came up with our traditional standard herringbone wing that starts with a drum pulley base, and then there is a wing steel with a round contact bar welded to the top of it. That’s where we started. We’ve had that product out for quite a long time, put it in a lot of different applications, and it does a great job with all the things we mentioned, as far as cleaning, taking care of the belts, tracking your belts.

And then over time, we had some different requests for smaller diameter versions of that herringbone wing. Once you get down to 12 inches and smaller, you can’t use our herringbone wing design to meet those small diameters, and so we redesigned another version of our herringbone wing. We call it our plate herringbone wing.

JK: Okay.

AM: And the difference is, it has, instead of having a drum base with contact bars welded to the wing, the wing is the contact bar. It’s a thicker bar. The thickness of that varies based on the size of the pulley. It increases as the pulley gets bigger, obviously. So that gives us the capability to get down to closer to a six inch diameter pulley. It still has all the same features and benefits of the active cleaning, of the treating your belt more like a drum pulley, taking care of the belt, the noise reduction, all those same benefits apply to that pulley. And over time, people started seeing that design and they said, “Well, we like the plate herringbone wing concept. Can you make that pulley bigger?” And so we’re like, “Yes, we can.” And so now there’s a large overlap in diameters and face widths of both of those pulleys that a customer can decide what their preference is. Some prefer the plate herringbone wing style, and some prefer the traditional herringbone wing style with the wing and the round bar. So they can kind of make that choice and what works better for their application.

JK: So what maybe would be an instance where you might choose the plate over the traditional herringbone, or the traditional herringbone over the plate wing pulley?

AM: Well, the first and biggest is the original reason for the diameter, right? You know, if you get down to that small diameter, that’s what you have to use. As you get bigger, some people look at the thickness and the size of the contact bars, and if everything was wearing normal and evenly on their pulley and their conveyor, you’ve got a lot of wing to wear through to get a long life out of that pulley. On the traditional herringbone wing, with that round bar, you’re going to kind of wear into that fast because you’re starting on the edge of a round bar, and then as you wear into the thickness of the round bar, it wears slowly. You get the life out of it and then it starts wearing a little bit faster as you get towards the bottom of the round bar, right? So it’s kind of application based, and sometimes it’s even a perception based, what’s going to work in your application better.

There are a few advantages that you can do with the traditional herringbone wing that you can’t do with the plate herringbone wing.

JK: Okay.

AM: We can offer a AR 400 round bar on the standard herringbone wing. All the wings on the plate herringbone wing are a 1045 steel. So if we were looking for more abrasion resistance, there’s some specialty products you can upgrade to on the traditional herringbone wing style. One is the AR bar. And then we’ve had other applications where we’ve had customers that were wearing through the AR contact bar every about six months, and they came to us and said, “Hey, can you help us find something that will last longer in these applications?” And we kind of went to the drawing board to find a product that would work for them. We’d done a lot of testing on our AR bar, and we figured out that the AR bar is really good for impact, but it didn’t gain you as much as we’d like to have it gain you in abrasion resistance.

So, we started looking at some other products and we came up with a chromium carbide plated material to use for our contact bars, and we call that our ContinuWing. Again, that’s just an upgraded version of the herringbone wing with the chromium carbide contact bars instead of the round bar. We actually built the first two of those, it’s been four years ago now, and put those two pulleys in the application where they were wearing through the AR bar in about six months, and it’s been four years, coming up in four years. And we send a field technician out every year to measure the percentage of loss on those contact bars. And in four years, you can barely measure a loss of thickness on there.

JK: That’s super impressive.

AM: Yeah, and they’ve done some testimonials for us based on those results, because if you go to the bottom line, we’ve saved them basically eight pulley changeouts in that four-year period.

JK: Yeah.

AM: And it’s just, it’s a no-brainer to pay for the upgraded cost of that ContinuWing versus the AR herringbone wing.

JK: And it sounds like, if you’re going four years as opposed to six months, not only has that saved them, like you mentioned, those eight changeouts, but sounds like it’s going to save them a lot more in the future. Like it’s not just going to stop there.

AM: Yes. I mean, we’re thinking we’re going to keep doing this test every year, and in four years we’ll be talking about the same conversation, and it’s still in there running properly, and they’re really happy with the results of that.

JK: That’s awesome. That’s really cool. So, you know, I got to ask. I mean, obviously there’s been a lot of developments and you’ve kind of run me through sort of how your wing pulleys have grown and evolved. Where do you go from here? You know, sort of what else is there to do? You get a pulley that’s lasting four years and going on even more. Obviously, nothing’s ever perfect, but what more can be done with this thing? It’s just so impressive what you guys have done so far.

AM: Well, you. So I guess in that application, we’re ready to move on to the next thing. There’s always something going on a tour end users, at the quarries, there’s some issue they’re having that we can come in and help them solve and find a new solution for. That’s one thing PPI is good at, is identifying problems and then working with those customers to figure out a improved solution for them, and then taking that and turning it into something we can offer to everybody else as well.

JK: Yeah.

AM: In the wing pulley world, I’m not sure what’s next, you know? We’ve kind of gotten to a point where this is a really, really good product right now-

JK: Clearly.

AM: … And I’m sure there’ll be stuff to come, though,

JK: Fantastic.

AM: We always find something.

JK: That’s an exciting time. So tell me a little bit about more … Obviously, the herringbone wing, sort of the wing pulleys in general, the ContinuWing are sort of front and center for PPI. For those that might not be as familiar with PPI, tell me about some other options that the company provides. You know, again, maybe application based, or depending on what someone’s looking for.

AM: PPI builds basically any kind of pulley component or idler component that would go on a conveyor. So anything that the belt touches on a belt conveyor, that’s what we do. We have lots of options with lagging for head pulleys. A lot of times on your drum pulley, if it’s the drive, you’ll put rubber lagging on it. That helps the belt grip the pulley. We’ve got many different options for that, too, whether it’s a different grooving. Traditionally, it’s herringbone groove that makes that pulley directional, it has to be put in a certain way. We like to push a diamond grooving. So it’s basically herringbone groove both ways. And all of a sudden that pulley is not directional. So if your customer orders itm goes and installs it, they can’t put it in backwards. It’ll clean and it’ll help moisture and debris clear out of that pulley as it’s going.

We also have different lagging options for that. Traditionally, it’s an SBR 60 durometer lagging. We’ve also got an AR version of that lagging. It’s a 60 durometer AR lagging. It’s a different rubber compound, and for a small percentage more in initial price, you get at least 50 percent extra life, abrasion resistance wise, out of that lagging. So it kind of falls in line with what we did with the ContinuWing on the wing pulley end of the conveyor.

JK: Yeah.

AM: So that’s something that we’ve had available for a long time, and we didn’t promote it a lot. And then it came up as a hot item in the last couple years, and we started looking at a bunch of different AR-type laggings, and we came back to the one that we already had was the best out of those. And so we’ve kind of did a relaunch of that over the last number of months, and that’s been a well-received product.

JK: Yeah.

AM: And you can’t tell any difference when you’re looking at the AR 60 durometer versus the SBR 60 durometer. So, what we do to indicate that is we put a wear indicator strip of rubber down on the pulley before the rubber is extruded onto it. So if it’s an AR lagged pulley, it’ll have a red strip on it. If it’s a regular SBR 60, once we get to over 20-inch diameter, I believe it is, we’ll put a green strip on that. So that serves two purposes. One, if it has the red strip, you know it’s AR lagging. And as that pulley runs out in the facility, and you’re walking through doing a visual inspection, and you’re looking at pulleys overhead, and you start seeing this green or red strip coming around the pulley, you know you’ve only got about a eighth inch or a 16th inch of lagging left on there. So, you should plan to address that during your next downtime, whether it’s ordering another pulley or planning to have that pulley shipped back for a strip and a re-lag with new rubber on it. But you know you have a little bit of time before you start working into the face of the steel pulley, and then you can’t re-lag it once you start wearing that.

JK: Right, that makes sense. So, you’ve laid out a lot of great stuff here, a lot of the great features that PPI offers in its pulleys and idlers and the lagging and whatnot. But you know, for anyone that’s listening to this, that, again, is maybe considering PPI, or maybe isn’t convinced. If they sort of say, “Why PPI?” Or, “What sets PPI apart from other similar companies?” What would you tell them?

AM: Well, it starts with, we like to be easy to work with. We like to be the company that can respond quickly if you have a need. We’ll get you a quote back. We can get that order going. We can get the product through our facility fast. And on top of that, we provide great service to our customers. We’ve got a full field engineering team that we have guys stationed around the country, that if you have an issue with a performance of a conveyor, whether it’s a pulley or an idler, whether it’s our product or not our product, we’ll come in there and help diagnose what’s going on and offer our best solutions to be able to overcome that. So, that really kind of sets us apart from a lot of others, where we have that team to take care of that.

JK: Yeah, excellent. Well Allen, I really appreciate the time here today. A lot of great insight. Thank you so much for sharing everything you have about PPI. For those that might be interested in learning more, getting in touch with you or finding out more about the company, how can they go about doing that? Well,

AM: Well, you can either get a hold of your PPI sales rep, whether that’s through a distributor, or if you are an OEM company you can look up our website. All of our literature is on our PPI website, and that is ppi-global.com. All of our flyers, there’s a training tab, contacts. It has the map of what sales guys cover what territories, so that’ll help direct you to which person you need to get ahold of.

JK: Excellent, excellent. Awesome Allen. Thank you so much again. Best of luck the rest of this year to PPI and thanks for joining us.

AM: I appreciate you having me. Thank you.

Interview Ends

JK: Thanks to Allen Mathes and PPI for being a part of this episode. A lot of great information there. Be on the lookout for next episode where Pit & Quarry editor-in-chief and Drilling Deeper co-host Kevin Yanik talks with Rob Duke, the founder of Armada Materials. The two discuss the history of Armada Materials, which was founded in 2023, and where the company is headed. You won’t want to miss it. For Jack Kopanski, this has been Drilling Deeper. See you next time.