Sidewall Conveyor Belts: Selection Guide for Steep Incline Duty

Steep incline conveying looks simple on a flowsheet. Material goes up. In practice it is the single hardest duty a fabric belt can be asked to do, because every degree of inclination trades away the friction that a flat belt depends on. Past roughly 18° a smooth belt stops being a conveyor and starts being a slide.

This guide is written for the people who have to sign the purchase order. It covers how to choose between a sidewall conveyor belt, a profiled belt and a bucket elevator; how to size the sidewall and the cross cleats; how to pick ply count and tension rating; how to set transition geometry and minimum pulley diameter; and how to keep the return side clean. It ends with the two things buyers actually care about at the end of the month, which are how to audit the plant and how to inspect the goods before they ship.

Send us your incline, tonnage and material — get a sidewall belt selection sheet back

One note before the engineering. This page is the steep incline page. If your problem is a 20° to 32° incline carrying dry, lumpy, non-confined material, the answer is usually a profiled belt and the deep dive sits on our chevron conveyor belt page. The two belt families overlap in the 25° to 35° band and nowhere else, and the decision rule is at the end of section 01.

01Where a Sidewall Belt Beats Everything Else, and Where It Loses

The reasoning starts with a number that most catalogue pages never state. A smooth rubber belt running on a clean steel trough can hold material at about 16° to 18° of inclination before static friction is overcome. Add a 4 mm to 6 mm moulded cleat pattern and you can push that to somewhere between 25° and 32°, depending on whether the material is dry, whether there is fines content, and how badly the belt is surcharged at the loading point. Those figures assume a clean belt. Rain, washdown water or a wet clay feed will pull the practical limit back by 5° to 8° in a single shift.

A sidewall belt sidesteps friction entirely. The corrugated sidewall forms a physical wall and the cross cleats form a physical pocket, so the material is carried, not gripped. That is why a well-built sidewall belt will run at 60°, 75° or even vertical, and why the Chinese and European manufacturers who export into tunnelling projects routinely quote 35° to 80° as a working band. The physics stops being about friction and starts being about pocket volume, sidewall stiffness and whether the material can be discharged cleanly at the head.

The trade is real, and it lives in three places. Sidewall belts cannot be cleaned by a standard scraper, because the wall passes through the scraper line. They demand a dedicated take-up that keeps the belt under tension through the whole high-load arc, or the wall buckles. And they need a head pulley big enough to let the pocket open and empty before the belt returns. Get those three right and the belt will outlast a profiled belt on the same duty. Get them wrong and you will be replacing sidewalls every nine months.

So the decision rule, stated plainly. Choose the sidewall family when inclination exceeds about 35°, when the material must be fully confined because it is dusty, hazardous or expensive, when the footprint is so tight that a longer, shallower conveyor does not fit, or when the material is fine and fluid and would simply run off a cleated belt. Choose the profiled family when inclination sits between 20° and 32°, when the material is dry and lumpy and does not need side containment, when the head and tail need to stay compact and cheap, and when the belt must survive being scraped. Between 32° and 35° is a genuine grey zone and both will work; the tiebreaker is usually whether you can afford the head pulley the sidewall belt requires.

We supply both families, so this is not a case for one product. As a conveyor belt manufacturer working mainly in heavy duty industrial conveyor belt grades, we see far more money lost to a sidewall belt specified on a duty that suited a chevron belt than the reverse. Over-engineering an incline is a quiet way to add 40% to the installed cost and 100% to the maintenance burden.

02Reading Incline, Material and Belt Speed Before Anything Is Quoted

Four inputs decide the entire specification. They are the true maximum incline along the belt path, the bulk material's behaviour when wet, the required throughput in tonnes per hour, and the head pulley diameter you can physically fit. Everything else, from ply count to cleat pitch, is downstream of those four.

Incline is the one most often got wrong, because people quote the chute angle rather than the belt angle. A conveyor that runs at 30° for 30 m and then flattens to 12° for the discharge is not a 30° conveyor; it is a conveyor with a 30° section, and any material that begins to slide on the shallow part will still pile against the lowest cleats. Walk the steel with a digital inclinometer and record the steepest 3 m to 5 m segment. That number is the design angle.

Material behaviour is the second trap. A dry limestone at 12 mm to 40 mm lump size on a 45° incline behaves very differently from the same limestone as −5 mm fines with 6% surface moisture. The fines will hold together in a pocket and discharge as a slug, which loads the head and the chute in an unbalanced way. We have seen a 900 mm wide belt on a cement kiln feed application hold a perfectly stable pocket at 62° with 3% moisture, then fail to discharge at all when the same material arrived at 9% moisture after a wet season. The belt was fine. The specification assumed a material that no longer existed.

Throughput then sets the belt width and the pocket geometry together, and the two pull in opposite directions. To carry 400 t/h at 1.6 t/m³ on a 55° incline you need a certain pocket cross-section, and you can get it either by widening the belt or by raising the sidewall. Widening is nearly always the cheaper option, because sidewall height drives stiffness, mass per metre and pulley diameter faster than width does. The exception is a tight tunnel or a mobile crusher where the frame simply has no room for width.

Belt speed finishes the job. Sidewall belts generally run slower than flat belts on the same tonnage, typically 1.0 m/s to 2.0 m/s against 2.5 m/s to 4.0 m/s, because a deep pocket at high speed will not fill evenly at the loading point and will not empty completely at the head. Below about 1.0 m/s the material tends to dribble out of the pocket over the head instead of being thrown clear, and that dribble ends up exactly where your return side is.

Fill that table honestly and you have already eliminated about half the wrong answers. Every quotation that arrives without those five numbers having been measured on site is a guess dressed as engineering, whether it comes from a conveyor belt supplier in Europe or from a domestic rubber conveyor belt mill.

03Setting Sidewall Height and Cleat Pitch Without Guesswork

Wall height is derived, never chosen. Start with the pocket cross-section the throughput demands, divide it by the effective material width, and you have the height. The effective material width is smaller than buyers expect, because the corrugated wall has a base flange. On a 1,000 mm base belt with 100 mm walls, the usable pocket is about 860 mm to 880 mm wide; the wall assembly and its bonding flange consume roughly 60 mm to 70 mm on each side. Anyone quoting capacity from nominal belt width is overstating the belt by 15% or more.

Standard wall heights run at 40, 60, 80, 100, 120, 160, 200, 250 and 300 mm. The jump from 120 mm to 160 mm is where the engineering changes. Below 120 mm a single-ply corrugated profile with a vertical or lightly ribbed face holds its shape under normal take-up tension. Above 160 mm the wall becomes a cantilever that wants to deflect outwards under the head of material, and the profile needs either a heavier rib pattern or a reinforcing fabric insert moulded into the wall. If a supplier offers you a 250 mm wall with no comment on wall reinforcement, that is the moment to ask a second supplier.

Cleats do the vertical work. Standard cross cleat patterns are the T type for free-flowing material, the TS type with a steeper back face for sticky or cohesive material, the TC type with a curved base that sheds fines, and the chevron C type where the material must be held a little longer before discharge. Cleat pitch on a sidewall belt is not a free variable; it is set by the wall's corrugation pitch, because the cleat must land on a corrugation valley to bond properly. Common pitches are 200, 250, 300 and 400 mm.

Pitch selection follows material cohesion. For dry sand or crushed granite at −20 mm, a 250 mm or 300 mm pitch gives a pocket that fills and empties cleanly. For wet clay, filter cake or a sticky biomass, tighten to 200 mm so the pocket cannot bridge and carry material back over the head. There is a cost, because halving pitch roughly doubles the number of cleats, the weight per metre and the vulcanising labour. On a 62° tunnel muck conveyor we rebuilt in 2024, moving from 400 mm to 250 mm pitch on a 1,000 mm belt cut the return-side carryback by roughly two thirds, and the material was a wet, plastic silt that had been packing between cleats for months.

Cleat height relates to wall height rather than to pitch. As a working rule the cleat stands between 60% and 100% of the wall height. Too low and the pocket is shallow and you have paid for wall you are not using. Too high and the cleat tip can contact the chute, the skirt or the return belt on a tight transition. Most mills build cleats at 75% to 85% of wall height unless the customer specifies otherwise.

Then there is cross-rigidity, the failure mode nobody tests on the bench. A tall wall on a narrow belt will buckle inwards on the return strand when the belt runs slack or when the take-up is short of the calculated figure. Inward buckling is worse than outward, because the two walls pinch together, the pocket closes, and the belt starts to guide badly. The cure is either a wider base belt or a stiffer wall profile, and stiffness costs money. Our own rule when we quote is that wall height should not exceed half the base belt width without a review of the return run supports.

Ask for the wall, cleat and base belt as one vulcanised assembly from a single conveyor belt factory. Mixed sourcing is where most sidewall failures begin, because a wall bonded to a base belt with a different compound and a different cure cycle will lift at the flange sooner or later. The bond line is the whole product.

04Base Belt Construction, Ply Count and Tension Rating

The base belt under a sidewall assembly is usually an EP fabric carcass, built to DIN 22102 or the equivalent GB-T 9770 grade, with abrasion-resistant covers on both faces. Steel cord carcasses exist and are used where the incline is very long, but a standard sidewall belt on even a 250 m run is normally EP. If your run is long enough that steel cord is being discussed, read our steel cord conveyor belt page first, because the take-up and pulley rules change completely.

Ply count for a sidewall belt runs higher than for a flat belt on the same width, and the reason is stiffness rather than tension. A 1,000 mm flat belt carrying 300 t/h might be built 3 ply. The same width with 120 mm walls and 250 mm cleats is normally built 4 ply, and it is not because the tension demand doubled. It is because the carcass has to resist the eccentric load the wall imposes and stay flat across the width. A belt that flexes across its width will let the wall sway, and a swaying wall tears its own bond.

Working figures, drawn from our own order book rather than from a catalogue. A 650 mm belt with walls up to 80 mm is commonly 3 ply at 800 N/mm. A 1,000 mm belt with 100 mm to 160 mm walls sits at 4 ply and 1,000 to 1,250 N/mm. A 1,400 mm belt with 200 mm walls and above goes to 5 ply and 1,400 to 1,600 N/mm. Customers sometimes ask to drop a ply to save weight, and sometimes there is a legitimate case, but the saving is typically 8% to 12% of belt cost against a much larger risk of wall bond failure.

Take-up tension deserves more attention than it usually gets. A sidewall belt needs a higher minimum tension than a flat belt of the same rating, because the belt must stay taut enough for the pocket to hold its shape through the loaded arc. If the take-up is undersized the pocket sags between idlers, the material migrates to the centre, and you lose effective capacity even though the belt looks fine. Screw take-up is acceptable on short mobile units. On a fixed conveyor longer than about 40 m, a gravity or hydraulic take-up with enough travel to cover 1.5% of centre distance is the safer specification.

Cover grade then depends on the material, and this is where a generic sidewall quotation usually falls short. Abrasive crushed rock at 60° calls for a wear grade in the 18 MPa DIN abrasion class, and our abrasion resistant conveyor belt range is built for that. Hot clinker or sinter needs a heat grade, and a sidewall belt who carries it must have a wall compound that survives the same temperature, which many do not. That is a separate selection problem covered on our heat resistant conveyor belt page. Oil-soaked scrap or a machining swarf feed pushes you toward an oil resistant conveyor belt, and a coal or biomass tunnel application may require a fire resistant conveyor belt conforming to AS 1332 or DIN 22109 fire test clauses.

Sharp, heavy lump at the loading point is the other cover issue, and on a steep conveyor it is worse than on a flat one because the material gains vertical velocity in the chute. Where the feed drop exceeds about 1.5 m onto 300 mm plus rock, specify an impact cut resistant conveyor belt base or fit impact idlers under the loading zone rather than accepting cover gouging as normal.

Two buying points close this section. Sidewall belts are almost always supplied as an open-ended assembly and vulcanised into an endless loop on site or at a workshop, because a belt with cleats cannot be threaded through a frame. Plan the splice window into your shutdown, and keep the splice zone free of wall and cleat so the press can close flat. Where you are rolling this out across several sites or a long project, consolidating the order as wholesale conveyor belts on one specification and one cure cycle is safer than buying belt-length by belt-length, since it guarantees the same compound and the same bond process across every unit.

05Transition Geometry, Minimum Pulley Diameter and the Head

If there is one section a buyer should send to their mechanical engineer, it is this one. Sidewall belts fail at the transitions far more often than on the incline itself. The incline is steady state. The transitions are where the belt is asked to do something geometrically impossible.

The tail transition is the first constraint. A belt with 120 mm walls cannot bend down into a conventional 30° troughing set at the tail without the walls starting to fold. Sidewall belts therefore run flat through the loading zone, supported on flat or very shallow idlers, with the skirt rubber sitting on top of the sidewall rather than beside it. That changes the loading chute design. Material must land centrally and softly, because an off-centre load on a flat sidewall belt at the tail will push the belt sideways and there is no trough to hold it.

The head transition is the second and harder constraint. The minimum pulley diameter for a sidewall belt is set by the base belt's ply count and by the wall's ability to open. Take a rough figure of 100 mm of pulley diameter per ply for the base belt, then add a margin for the wall. A 4 ply belt therefore wants a 400 mm pulley from the carcass alone, but a 1,000 mm belt with 160 mm walls usually will not discharge properly below 630 mm, and on sticky material we have specified 800 mm to get a clean release. Shortening the head pulley to save space is the mistake we see most often on retrofit projects.

Then look at what happens after the pulley. The pocket must be open, facing downward, for long enough that the material falls out. At 1.5 m/s on a 630 mm pulley, the arc at the top of the head is brief. If the material is cohesive, part of it will ride over the crown and drop onto the return strand right behind the pulley. There is a fix, and it is not a bigger scraper, because the walls block any scraper. Angle discharge blades set between the cleats, running on the belt face just behind the head pulley, will lift the residue out of the pocket. Getting those blades right is a job for the belt supplier and the chute designer working together, which is exactly why we ask customers to send drawings rather than a belt size alone. Clients who buy through a conveyor belt distributor with no engineering desk often end up solving this on site with a grinder, badly.

Pulley specification is a whole topic of its own and ours is covered under conveyor pulleys. For sidewall duty, insist on a crowned face only on the return pulley, keep the head pulley cylindrical and lagged, and check that the lagging groove pattern does not trap fines that the walls have already scraped loose. A lagged head pulley with a deep herringbone pattern on a dusty sidewall conveyor becomes a compaction zone.

Drive side, the same logic as any incline applies with one addition. A steep conveyor with pockets holding material can be heavily unbalanced when it starts loaded, so the drive has to be specified for a loaded start rather than a gentle ramp. Gearbox and coupling selection are not belt decisions, but the belt's rated tension does interact with them, and if you also need to select the transmission elements on the same project, our team covers transmission belt manufacturer work as well, including a dedicated V-belt manufacturer line and a timing belt range for drive conversions.

One figure worth keeping in the back of your mind. On a two-pulley incline with 4 ply belting and 160 mm walls, we have measured sidewall fatigue cracking starting at the inside of the corrugation within 11 months when the head pulley was 500 mm, and no measurable cracking at 36 months when the same belt family ran on a 700 mm pulley at the same tonnage. Same belt, same material, different geometry. The pulley is not a place to save money.

06Carryback, Spillage and Cleaning on the Return Side

Every discussion of sidewall belts eventually arrives at the same complaint, which is material on the floor under the return strand. There is no belt cleaner that fits between cleats, so the powder that stayed in the pocket on the way up comes back down and drops off somewhere along the return run. Handling that is a design problem, not a cleaning problem.

Four measures, in order of how much they help per dollar. Tighten the cleat pitch so pockets empty instead of retaining. Fit a catch tray and plough just under the head pulley to intercept the material that leaves on the return. Support the return strand with a flat or very shallow idler set so pockets are not compressed against the belt. And, if the operation can tolerate it, reduce the number of empty pockets by running the belt fully loaded rather than partially loaded, because partly filled pockets are the ones that sling material sideways over the head.

Return idler choice matters more than most people assume on a steep conveyor. A standard return idler with a flat roll works, but on a belt carrying sticky fines we prefer a rubber-disc or spiral roll, which knocks material off the face as it passes rather than letting it build. Where the return run is long and the belt tends to wander, a self-aligning idler at two or three points will hold tracking without the belt pressing against a fixed guide, and a fixed guide on a sidewall belt is a wall destroyer because the wall is what touches it first. A training idler placed in the first 10 m after the head is usually enough to correct the small misalignments that follow from uneven loading.

Support idlers on the carrying side need care as well. Because the belt runs flat under a tall pocket, the troughing idler sets used on the incline section are shallow, often 10° to 20°, and occasionally flat with a single long roll. Under the loading chute, an impact idler with rubber rings will absorb the drop energy that would otherwise crack the base belt under the cleat bond line. On a long, exposed incline, a garland idler set is worth considering because the articulated rolls follow a wandering belt and resist the shock of lumpy feed, and because garland sets are quick to change out with a chain pivot rather than a bolted frame.

Frames and brackets are the last piece of the spillage puzzle, and the most neglected. On a sidewall conveyor the return strand often sits directly above the equipment or the walkway below, so any material that leaves the belt has somewhere bad to go. Put a containment plate under the return run, catch it at the head, and make sure the frame allows the tray to be pulled out for cleaning without dismantling the conveyor. Our conveyor brackets range includes adjustable take-up brackets for exactly this reason. Anyone who has ever spent a night shift shovelling out a transfer tower will understand why a removable tray beats a welded one.

Where the material is dusty and the incline is steep, dust suppression and belt cleaning are related but distinct problems, and both need to be designed in. Water sprays on a sidewall belt should be aimed at the pocket opening and not at the wall bond, because water that works its way under a lifted flange accelerates wall failure faster than any abrasion will.

07Duty Profiles: How the Industry Changes the Answer

The same nominal belt behaves very differently in a quarry, a cement works, a tunnel and a recycling yard, and the differences are not marketing differences. They change the base belt, the wall compound, the cleat style and the maintenance interval.

In hard rock mining and quarrying, the feed is lumpy, sharp and heavy, and the incline is usually a short transfer rather than a long haul. The dominant failure is impact damage at the loading point and torn covers, not wall fatigue. Specify the heaviest abrasion grade you can justify, an impact grade base under the chute, and sidewalls rated for the temperature of the season rather than the bench test. Wall heights on crusher feed conveyors rarely need to exceed 120 mm because the incline is usually under 40° and the material has enough internal friction to help itself.

Cement and clinker duty is the opposite. The incline is often steep, the material can be hot, and the fines content means pockets hold and discharge poorly. A cement plant sidewall belt typically needs a tighter cleat pitch than the tonnage alone would suggest, a heat-tolerant cover if the feed is hot, and generous head pulley diameter because cement tends to hang in the pocket. We quoted a 1,000 mm, 4 ply belt with 160 mm walls and 250 mm pitch for a kiln feed line in 2025 where the customer originally wanted 320 mm pitch; the reduce in pitch cost about 14% more on the belt and removed a weekly manual clean-out that had been running for two years.

Tunnelling and shaft work is the extreme case. Inclines run from 45° to vertical, the material is wet, abrasive and unpredictable because it changes with geology, and the conveyor has to tolerate being extended every few days. Sidewall belts are the only sensible answer above about 40°, wall heights tend to be tall relative to width, and the specification should include a generous take-up and a wall profile that resists inward buckling. Our belt family with the C15 cleat and full rubber sidewall is built precisely for this pattern, where the load profile changes daily rather than yearly.

Recycling and waste sorting is where buyers most often over-specify and then regret it. A recycling line handles film, cardboard, PET and mixed municipal waste, often with metal contamination and no consistent bulk density. Sharp metal will cut any belt, so the priority is a cut-resistant carcass with a repairable cover rather than a heavy sidewall. Most recycling inclines are under 30° and a flat or lightly profiled belt is cheaper and easier to repair. Where a sidewall is genuinely needed, usually at a sorting station where space is tight, keep the wall low and the base belt repairable by a mobile press.

Other duties follow their own logic. Port bulk material handling transfers want high tonnage and long life with a stable, well-defined material, and the design leans on pulley diameter and tension. Warehouse and logistics incline sorters are light duty and rarely justify a corrugated wall at all. In food packaging lines the sidewall question is usually about hygiene rather than angle, and a moulded PU flight on a solid-woven belt will beat a rubber corrugated wall on cleanability every time.

Reading across that table is the fastest way to sanity-check a quotation you have received. If the supplier has proposed 400 mm pitch for a cement kiln feed line, or a 3 ply base under 200 mm walls in a tunnel, you now know which question to ask. And if the duty is a 28° quarry incline with dry, lumpy rock, ask yourself honestly whether a profiled belt from our chevron conveyor belt range would do the job for less money and less maintenance. Often it would.

08Auditing the Factory and Inspecting the Goods Before They Ship

The engineering is only half of a purchase. The other half is establishing that the belt you specified is the belt you receive, and that takes a factory visit and a documented pre-shipment inspection. Neither is optional on a belt that will be vulcanised on site and then be effectively impossible to return.

Start with the plant, not the paperwork. A sidewall belt factory needs a flat vulcanising press long enough to cure the full belt length or the belt sections, a separate press or a two-stage operation for the wall and cleat bonding, and a wall extrusion or moulding line. If a supplier cannot show you the wall bonding line, they are buying walls in and assembling, and the bond quality is outside their control. During our audits we ask three things that separate a real manufacturer from a trader with a website. Show me the wall mould. Show me the press that bonds the wall flange to the base belt. Show me the cured cleat you cut off a scrap belt so I can look at the bond interface.

Then verify the materials against the specification, not against a certificate alone. Cover thickness is easy to mismeasure because the wall flange hides part of the edge, so measure the base belt cover at three points between cleats and average them. Carcass weight per square metre should match the drawing, and a quick check with a portable thickness gauge across the full width will show up a thin centre. Ask for the rubber compound batch records for the day your belt was pressed, not a generic type test report from two years ago.

Our own quality assurance process follows DIN 22102 for the base belt, checks the corrugated wall against the wall clause of the standard, and records tension test data on the finished splice rather than on a laboratory sample. It is worth asking any conveyor belt factory you are considering what standard they test walls to, because the answer is revealing. Some will answer with the base belt standard, which means the wall has never been tested at all.

Packing matters more than buyers expect on a belt with 200 mm walls and 250 mm cleats. Cleats and walls are the first thing to be crushed, so the belt must be rolled on a core large enough that the cleats do not stack on top of one another, and the roll ends must be protected. Ask for the roll diameter and the core diameter on the packing list. A belt that arrives with flattened cleats has already lost part of its capacity, and proving that it left the factory that way after the container has been opened is a fight nobody wins.

Finally, plan the after-sales path before you order. Sidewall belts fail at the bond and the splice, and the party who made the belt should be the party who assists with the repair, either by sending a splice kit, a technician or a written method statement. Our service page sets out how we handle site support, and it is worth reading alongside the technical documents so that you know what you are buying beyond the belt itself. If a supplier cannot describe their repair method for a lifted wall flange, that is the last question to ask before you sign.

Request a sidewall belt audit checklist and quotation

09Frequently Asked Questions

How do I decide between a sidewall belt and a chevron belt on a steep incline?

Look at the maximum true incline and the material. Above about 35°, or whenever the material must be fully confined because it is dusty, hazardous or valuable, the corrugated wall with cross cleats is the right answer. Between 20° and 32° with dry, lumpy material that does not need side containment, a profiled belt is cheaper and easier to clean. The band from 32° to 35° is a genuine grey zone, and there the deciding factor is usually whether you have room for the larger head pulley that a walled belt needs.

What incline can these belts actually handle in practice?

Manufacturers quote a working band of roughly 35° to 80°, and vertical conveyors are common in tunnelling and shaft work. The practical limit is not friction, because the pocket carries the material, but discharge. Once the incline is steep enough that the pocket must release its load at the head, the head pulley diameter and the material's cohesion set the real ceiling. Wet, plastic materials are the ones that force you to keep the angle at the lower end of what the belt could theoretically do.

How high should the sidewall be for a given throughput?

Derive it from the pocket cross-section the tonnage demands, then divide by the effective material width. On a 1,000 mm base belt the usable pocket is only about 860 mm to 880 mm wide, because the wall assembly and its bonding flange take 60 mm to 70 mm on each side. As a sanity check, wall height should not exceed half the base belt width, and anything above 160 mm needs a wall profile with reinforcement rather than a plain corrugated face.

Why does material keep dropping off the return side?

Because nothing can scrape the belt face between cleats, so any material that stays in the pocket travels back down. Four measures fix most of it. Tighten the cleat pitch so pockets empty instead of retaining, fit a catch tray and plough under the head, support the return strand with flat or very shallow idlers, and avoid running the belt partly loaded, since partially filled pockets are the ones that throw material sideways over the head.

Can these belts be spliced on site?

They are almost always supplied open-ended and vulcanised into an endless loop on site or in a workshop, because a belt carrying cleats cannot be threaded through a conveyor frame. Keep the splice zone free of wall and cleat so the press can close flat, and allow at least 1.5 m of clear belt on each side of the stepped joint. Plan the splice window into a shutdown rather than treating it as running repair work.

What should I check before the goods leave the factory?

Measure wall height and pocket pitch at ten points and compare with the drawing, average the base belt cover thickness at three points between cleats, and run a pry test on the wall flange at three random positions to confirm the rubber tears rather than the bond lifting. Cut one scrap cleat and look at the interface for voids. Then confirm the packing roll diameter so the cleats are not stacked and crushed, and collect the compound batch records for the day the belt was pressed.