Skilifts.org / SORT Forum

What are the advantages and disadvantage of tire or chain driven cadencing in high speed lift terminals?

Also does anyone know the first lift in the world, and North America the used only tires in the terminals?

I think that there are less problems with the cadencing messing up with the tires, but those problems are easier to correct with the cadence chain. You might want to look here to find out a little more about it.

Boy there is a lot of Poma guys on ths forum. All this talk of cadencing. Doppelmayrs space instead of cadence. :P

Chains are definitely way easier if you hve a problem. Usually a quick call to the lifty to tell thm to put one chair in each set of teeth does the trick. Tyres are fine as long as you look after tyre pressure and belt tension. However if you stall a chair or two or three it will be time consuming to fix. I think the reason tyres are used almost exclusively is that the system is simpler and more compact and requires less horsepower to drive. One more note about spacing chains, if you break it, it will be a nightmare.

Same if the clutch goes out for the tires. If there is spacing problem you have a big problem if the clutch is out.

you got that right. We had a shaft break in one of ours and I believe it took 7 hours to fix. Lift was down most of the day.

Im not sure what the first was without the chain but I would think if the yan hsq at june in 87 was originally tire all the way I would think that may have been one of the first but don't hold me to that.

KZ, on Mar 6 2005, 10:18 PM, said:

Thats what I was thinking and what made me ask the question.

[quote name='Aussierob' date='Mar 6 2005, 07:58 PM']
Boy there is a lot of Poma guys on ths forum. All this talk of cadencing. Doppelmayrs space instead of cadence. :P [/quote]
This is true. You may be the token Doppeldude :P
One more note about spacing chains, if you break it, it will be a nightmare.
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[/quote]

This is also true. We had a broken link on the Flyer's cadence (spacing :D) chain last week, and when it jammed in the guide rail it caused the transmission ghain to bind. While it didn't break, they had to break it to move the cadence chain out of the guidage to fix the broken link. 49 minutes down. Not fun.

Personal opinion: chains = more maintenance but simpler spacing. As Aussierob said, they're very easy to explain to lift operators. Tyres = less hardware and maintenance, but more issues when the spacing clutch goes out or when chairs stall. From a bean-counter's standpoint, tyres make more sense as there are much less maintenance costs involved.

highspeedquad, on Mar 6 2005, 07:07 PM, said:

But if you do have a clutch shaft break, you can still run the lift...just without spacing. And you are still able to core space if you start having spacing issues.
A little off topic, but AussieRob, is Nells still working for you guys?

You can still run the lift, but with no fine spacing system operating its not too long before the spacing is so bad it starts to cause anti collision faults. Yuo can then fix it with the coarse spacer but yo have to run the lift slow for a few laps to do it. In the final analysis you're better to shut the lift down and fix it rather than annoy all your customers. Nels is still here in the winter. He's gone seasonal, 6 months on, 6 months off. I think he needs more time for

Can you just have a lift op standing there spacing the chairs as needed?

7hrs of down time or 2 laps of 3m/s? Every place is different.
No you can't just have a ops person there to space. Doppelmayr spacing works 2 ways Fine spacing (uses a high and low clutch to speed up or slow the chair down in the curve) These clutches are found in the drive station or Coarse spacing (Uses clutches to stall or stow chairs(can have up to 5 chairs in the station at one time 3 in stow, 1 entering, 1 exiting) and automatically spits them out according to preset spacing values(impulses) Coarse spacing is done at the return.

i was saying if the spacing system was broke could a lift op do the spacing?

No, it's not like a Von Roll gondola where you can just push it out of the terminal - you'd have to push the chair and override the friction tires, which isn't really an option...

-Iain

I should clarify my eariler post as I rather badly worded it. In the broken shaft scenario we had the lift couldn't be run because all of the pulleys had broken off the tyre shaft and I think we made our own replacement, hence the long repair time. Generally with a spacing clutch failure, you can still run the lift and coarse space it as necessary, however, this is annoying for everybody. My apologies - next time more thought, less type.

Would it be even possible to have lift ops push the chairs around? I would think that the carriers would be heavy, especially if it was a gondi, and you would need a lot more people there. And you would just have to keep going and going and going...

yes u can push the chairs around it might be hard but it can be done.

Its not that hard to do, when I was getting a tour of the Summit Express at Pico the Mechanic let me push a chair around on the emergency rail to see what it felt like, it wasen't that hard to push and I'm only 14.

umm it's harder if it's in the tire bank.

What kind of chair were you pushing? I just think that it would get very tiring to keep pushing around chairs and keeping about the right interval, over and over.
This post has been edited by highspeedquad: 08 March 2005 - 05:47 PM