When conveyor frame corrections work against you and how to regain control

Updated: 2026-07-18 View Count: 367

Conveyor frames are installed square and aligned during construction. But on mining conveyors they rarely stay that way for long.

To maintain production and account for changes in loading or belt behaviour, maintenance crews adjust frames to steer the belt back into position. The belt tracks better, the conveyor keeps moving, and the immediate issue appears to be sorted.

But this compounds during subsequent shutdowns, when crews remove the frames and reinstall them slightly differently. Over time, individual corrections accumulate and the original alignment reference is lost.

The belt may still track, but load is no longer shared evenly across the rollers. One side carries more weight. Heat builds. Wear increases. Premature roller failures begin to appear in the same sections again and again creating more maintenance work than should be necessary.

Further adjustments may temporarily settle the belt, but the problem just shifts along the conveyor. This pattern often indicates structural drift rather than a simple tracking issue.

This article outlines three practical steps to regain control of your conveyor system and reduce ongoing maintenance work.

Step 1: Consider a structural idler review

A re-alignment of the idler frames might sound like a big ask. It requires downtime, coordination, and more labour than a quick tracking adjustment. But if your conveyor system is a mid-life asset that tracks a different way every swing, it may be time to consider it.

Most conveyors accumulate small corrections for years before anyone considers a system reset. But when fixing one area creates a new issue elsewhere, or failures appear in multiple locations rather than a single problem zone, a structural review becomes worthwhile. At that point, the conveyor has lost a consistent reference and your maintenance effort increases without stabilising the belt.

With 17 years’ experience in conveyor maintenance roles, Gary Grout, Aftermarket Manager at YILUN explains: “You reach a point where you can spend hours chasing it and still not get the same result twice.”

He says that during a frame realignment review, the frames are returned to a neutral position and the conveyor is run under load to identify stable behaviour. The goal isn’t to make everything perfectly straight, but to determine whether the belt’s running line is being influenced by loading, splice geometry, or structure position. That information allows you to target corrections instead of continuing iterative adjustments.

“Once it’s reset, you can actually see which sections matter. Before that, you’re just tuning around old fixes,” he says.

Because this process often spans multiple conveyor sections and operating conditions, sites can bring in a YILUN conveyor engineer to run the review quickly. Rather than attempt to fit it incrementally with routine maintenance, the review can be completed within limited shutdown windows.

Step 2: Maintain consistency during maintenance work

After a reset, conveyors often run well… until the next shutdown.

Most long-term tracking instability is introduced gradually during routine maintenance. The frames are removed for access, replaced under time pressure, or positioned incorrectly by different crews across maintenance days or outages. Each change is minor and usually reasonable in isolation, but together they alter how the belt responds to load.

“If you don’t put it back the same way, you’re effectively re-tuning the conveyor every time you work on it,” says Gary.

For reliability teams, the goal is to preserve known conditions so the conveyor responds predictably after work is completed.

In practice, this typically means you need to:

• ◆ Document reference positions

• ◆ Reinstall frames with a consistent method

• ◆ And reassess tracking after major component changes, rather than inherit previous corrections

Sites that treat shutdown work this way tend to find that tracking remains stable between outages, instead of gradually deteriorating after each maintenance event.

Step 3. Stabilise unavoidable tracking zones with trainer frames

Even with consistent installation and a known baseline, some sections of a conveyor will never behave the same way every shift.

“Transfers change loading patterns, moisture varies, and belts respond differently under load than empty. In these areas you need a bit more help to gain control,” says Gary.

Trainer frames are useful to stabilise the belt where the running line is expected to move. Applied selectively, they keep the belt centred through variable conditions without changing the alignment of the rest of the conveyor.

“There are spots you can align perfectly and they’ll still wander once the load changes. That’s where you want controlled steering, not more adjustment,” he explains.

But the key is placement. Installing multiple trainer frames along the entire conveyor rarely solves instability because the underlying running line keeps shifting. When you position them at known influence points instead, typically near transfers, take ups or persistent drift zones, they limit movement so the rest of the structure can remain neutral.

“When they’re in the right locations, you stop chasing the problem. The belt behaves the same way every run instead of reacting to small changes.”

Used this way, trainer frames reduce repeated manual corrections and prevent localised damage without masking broader alignment problems.

Control instead of chase

Conveyor frames rarely stay in their original aligned state. Some level of adjustment is part of normal operation.

Problems begin when years of small corrections remove any consistent reference. Instead of managing the conveyor, maintenance effort shifts to reacting to it.

But there are a few simple methods to handle it:

• ◆ Reset your conveyor alignment when behaviour becomes unpredictable

• ◆ Preserve known conditions during shutdown work

• ◆ And stabilise variable zones

The aim isn’t perfectly straight frames. It’s a conveyor that behaves the same way tomorrow as it did today. But with fewer failures, less intervention, and maintenance effort spent where it adds value.