A chute liner wears through on a Tuesday. The strip you need is four inches wide and sixty long, and buying it usually means buying a whole sheet and finding somewhere to put the rest. We cut it off the rack in Sparks instead, in UHMW, HDPE or polypropylene, in the width and length you measured.
Every part below starts as a flat sheet and ends as a strip, a pad or a panel bolted somewhere a load slides across. What it gets called depends on who is asking.
Bolts to a frame so product slides on plastic instead of steel.
Panels lining a transfer chute so rock does not cut the shell.
The strip along the load zone that keeps fines on the belt.
Panels that keep material moving instead of bridging.
A block under a sliding or resting member. A flat surface something drags across.
A strip that keeps product tracking straight, or protects one surface from another.
Tell us the dimensions and what slides on it. The name does not matter to the saw.
Snap-on conveyor profile, the extruded shape that clips over a steel rail with no fasteners, is an extrusion and you should buy it from a conveyor supplier. Impact bars for a load-zone bed are a rubber assembly with a UHMW face, not a plastic strip. If that is what you need, say so and we will tell you straight rather than sell you a strip that will not do it.
Which material you cut it from is the next question, and it is the one people get wrong most often.
Three plastics that look nearly the same on the rack and behave nothing alike under load. Pick by the failure you are trying to stop.
| UHMW | HDPE | Polypropylene | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Use it when | Abrasion, impact, sliding | Cost matters, duty is light | Chemistry or heat drives the choice |
| Coefficient of friction, dry on steel | 0.10 – 0.20 | about 0.20 | 0.25 – 0.40 |
| Abrasion resistance | Best of the three by a wide margin | Middle | Worst |
| Impact | No break, notched Izod, ASTM D256 | Good | Notch sensitive |
| Max continuous service | 180 °F | about 180 °F | about 200 °F |
| Cold | Tough well below freezing | Good | Goes brittle near 32 °F |
| Stiffness, flex modulus | 100,000 – 130,000 psi | Higher than UHMW | 200,000 – 220,000 psi |
| Water absorption, 24 hr | 0.01% or less | under 0.01% | under 0.02% |
A word on the numbers. Published figures for UHMW disagree between sources, and not because anyone is lying. A premium lined-chute grade and a reprocessed utility sheet are both called UHMW and they do not test the same. The figures above are typical ranges from manufacturer data sheets, not a spec. If your drawing calls out a number, send it and we will confirm against the data sheet for the grade we would actually cut.
Grade matters as much as material, and one grade choice fails audits.
Reprocessed UHMW in a food plant. It looks like the black sheet in the chute across town and it will not pass an audit. If the part touches product, it is virgin natural.
Grade and material settled, there is still one thing that takes more strips off machines than wear does.
Almost nobody wears out a wear strip. They come off early because of how they were mounted.
UHMW expands roughly eleven to seventeen times as much as steel for the same change in temperature. Published coefficients run about 7 to 11 × 10-5 inches per inch per degree Fahrenheit. That sounds like a footnote until you run the number on a real part.
A ten foot UHMW strip, through a hundred degree swing from a January morning to an August afternoon, grows about one inch.
Bolt that strip down through round holes sized to the bolt and it has nowhere to go. It bows off the frame, tears out the fasteners, or both. It is not a material defect and it is not a bad batch. It is the plastic doing exactly what the data sheet said it would.
| Sheet thickness | Fastener spacing on centers |
|---|---|
| 1/4″ | 6 to 8 inches |
| 3/8″ | 8 to 10 inches |
| 1/2″, 5/8″, 3/4″ | 12 to 15 inches |
| 1″ and over | 15 to 20 inches |
And no fastener further than two inches from any edge. Spacing figures from the Redwood Plastics UHMW liner installation guide.
Countersink or counterbore so the head finishes below the wear surface, and watch what you have left underneath. A counterbore that eats half a quarter inch strip has halved your wear life at every bolt. On thin material, flush mount instead.
All of which is easier if the holes arrive already in the part.
Straight cuts happen on the saw while you wait. Anything past that goes to the CNC in the same building.
Send a PDF or DXF. Inches are easiest. If you give us metric we will confirm the numbers back to you in inches before anything gets cut.
If a liner wears out on a schedule you can predict, tell us the interval and we keep the profile on file. The reorder is a phone call, not a fresh quote and a fresh drawing.
All of that assumes the thickness is on the floor when you call. Here is what is.
| Thickness | UHMW | HDPE | Polypropylene |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1/8″ | Same day | Same day | To order |
| 3/16″ | Same day | Same day | To order |
| 1/4″ | Same day | Same day | Same day |
| 3/8″ | Same day | Same day | Same day |
| 1/2″ | Same day | Same day | Same day |
| 3/4″ | Same day | Same day | Same day, white only |
| 1″ | Same day | Same day | To order |
Above one inch we bring it in, up to four. Tell us the thickness before you plan around it and we will say straight away whether it is a same-day cut or a few days out.
Sheet sizes. Standard sheet is 48 by 96. We also run 48 by 120 and 60 by 120, so a strip up to ten feet long comes out of one piece with no seam, and a liner panel up to five feet wide does too.
How thick. For wear duty the working range is a quarter inch to one inch, and three eighths and a half do most of the work. Thickness is your wear allowance plus whatever the counterbore takes. More is not automatically better: a thicker strip costs more, moves the same amount per inch of length, and does nothing for you if the part is failing at the fasteners instead of the face.
Free local delivery across Reno, Sparks, Carson City, Fernley and USA Parkway. Machined parts ship nationwide.
Most of what leaves on that truck goes to four or five kinds of plant.
Northern Nevada runs a lot of rock through a lot of steel.
Last month that was three quarter inch polypropylene cut into wear pads for a Nevada mine. Before that it was black UHMW chute liner for a gravel operation. The saw does not care which; the material and the holes do.
The questions that come up on the phone are usually the same seven.
No. We cut from stock in Sparks, one piece or a full sheet. If you need four strips, buy four strips.
Stock thicknesses are cut the same day. Holes, slots and profiles go to the CNC and take longer, and we will tell you how much longer when you send the drawing.
Tell us the tolerance the part actually needs and we will tell you straight whether the saw holds it or whether it belongs on the CNC. Most wear parts do not need a machining tolerance and paying for one is wasted money. One thing worth knowing: UHMW moves enough with temperature that a tight tolerance is meaningless unless you say what temperature you want it at.
Not really, and this is a common and expensive surprise. The same non-stick surface that makes it a good liner makes it a poor bonding surface. Welded seams reach roughly 60 to 80 percent of the parent material’s strength, which is fine for sealing a joint between panels and not fine for a structural joint. Bolt it.
Black outdoors, every time. Natural UHMW has poor UV resistance and chalks and embrittles in sun. Natural indoors, and natural where FDA compliance is the driver.
No, and you should not use it. It runs dry. Grease on a UHMW strip collects grit and turns the surface into a lapping compound.
Yes. Bring the worn one. We will measure it, match the profile and the hole pattern and keep the drawing on file for next time.
What we cut from stock is standard virgin natural and black UV grade UHMW, which covers most wear and liner work. TIVAR is a branded family of UHMW grades from Mitsubishi Chemical, and TIVAR 88 in particular is a lining grade made for flow promotion in bins and hoppers rather than plain wear. If your drawing names a grade, send it. We will confirm whether standard sheet meets the spec or quote the branded grade through the mill.
"Brought in a sketch on a napkin and they turned it into exactly what I needed. Same day."
Width, length, thickness, material, and what slides across it. A photo of the worn part is usually faster than a drawing. If there is a hole pattern, send a PDF or DXF and we will match it. No minimum, no full sheet, free delivery across Reno, Sparks, Carson City, Fernley and USA Parkway. Or call (775) 358-8211.
Silver State Plastics cuts UHMW, HDPE and polypropylene wear strips, wear pads, chute liners, skirtboard liners and hopper liners to size at our Sparks, NV shop, from sheet we hold ourselves. Seven thicknesses from 1/8″ to 1″ are on the rack and cut the same day. Slotted holes, counterbores, chamfers and profiles are routed on the CNC in the same building.
We supply wear parts to mining, aggregate, cement, conveyor, wastewater and food processing operations across northern Nevada, with free delivery in Reno, Sparks, Carson City, Fernley and USA Parkway and machined parts shipped nationwide. Bring the worn part, a sketch or a drawing. Visit us at 745 E. Greg St. #6, Sparks, NV 89431 or call (775) 358-8211.