The Company

The customer is a large bakery that produces dessert products such as cakes, pastries, cheesecakes, and similar items.  This application is basically an assembly line where they are putting together multi-layer cakes.  The green timing belts carry the trays that the cakes are sent out in, and the white bakery belt carries the cakes themselves.

The Challenge

This belt has been an ongoing issue for them.  The slippery nature of the trays requires that they use a belt with a PVC cover, but they also have stringent wash down and sanitation requirements.  The result is that they have to change the belt somewhat frequently (every 8-10 months) due to the sanitizing chemicals cracking the PVC cover.

They had previously been purchasing the timing belts endless from the OEM.  The belts are very long (22660mm), and disassembling the machine and changing the belts was usually a 6-hour process.  I had been calling on the maintenance manager for a while, and he finally gave me an opportunity and showed me this application.

The Solution

We offered him an equivalent Dura-Tech timing belt, but with the mechanical pin splice (DDT 10mm with 1mm blue PVC cover).  They immediately liked the idea and ordered a set of belts to try.  After getting the belts, the customer reported that the time to install the belts went from 6 hours to 30 minutes.

The Results/Outcome

The original conveyor belt we sold them lasted for about 6 months and then they began to see cracking issues on the PVC cover (as was expected).  To eliminate the cracking issues, we decided to try the Dura-Tech belt DTT 10 mm timing belt with no cover.  The belt with no cover has lasted more than 5 years and has translated into huge cost savings for the customer. From the cost of the belt, to a large amount of labor saved from easy installation, to now getting 5 years of life out of every belt vs 10 months, this has been a huge cost savings for the customer.