The Richwood Report

Check out the new white paper available on our website. Helpful proposed standard system for classifying belt cleaner applications.

Nice to hear from customers happy with their Richwood equipment. Here's an email to a Richwood sales engineer from a happy customer.

Hey Friend, I just wanted to say thanks for making such a good product. I work on belts underground in east ky your belt wipes make my job so much easier gives me time to work on other things instead of shoveling all the time. My moto is to, WIPE IT CLEAN WITH RICHWOOD GREEN thanks, Rod

For those who may not know, Richwood offers white papers covering conveyor product related topics on the website. there's good information on belt cleaning, saddles and pulley lagging in particular. The page is here.

Hope we can meet you at a show this year! These are coming in the near future:

AGG1/World of Asphalt in Cincinnati, OH February 16-18, Booth 1911

SME in Phoenix, AZ February 21-24, Booth 534

Sugarbeet Institute in Grand Forks, ND March 17-18

SME Duluth in Duluth, MN, April 20-21

For a complete listing of our show schedule for 2010, check here.

Really informative video about casting manufacture is here.

With failing businesses and institutions all around, we might well ask, "what are the qualities and characteristics that allow structures to survive and thrive in the midst of change". Here are some good places to start.

Here is an excellent capsule history of John Moses Browning. Not a lot of inventors have inventions still in common use practically in their original form 100 years after their invention but Browning has a lot of them like that. He built his first working firearm with his own hands when he was ten years old. He learned to design things by noticing what others missed. He repaired a severely damaged shotgun and learned a lesson about how big machines are made:

"Finally the idea came. A good idea starts a celebration in the mind, and every nerve in the body seems to crowd up to see the fireworks. It was a good idea, one of the best I ever had, and so simple it made me ashamed of myself. Boylike, I had been trying to do the job all at once with some kind of magic. And magic never made a gun that would work. I decided to take the gun apart, piece by piece, down to the last small screw, even though [the] parts that were mashed and twisted together. And when I did, finally finishing long after supper that night, the pieces all spread out before me on the bench, I examined each piece and discovered that there wasn’t one that I couldn’t make myself, if I had too. If I had been in school that day, I would have missed a valuable lesson"

He noticed that the weeds moved when a gun was fired and deduced that the wasted force of a gunshot could be used to make an automatic firearm. Lots of people had seen the weeds move but only the inventor made the connection between the motion and the capacity for work.
His .45 caliber pistol was adopted by the U.S. military in 1911 and has been in continuous use since then. There are fewer than 60 parts in one, counting screws, grips and all, and it is as dependable as a mechanical device can be even under the worst of conditions. Simplicity is the key to dependable equipment.
You can read more and see some pictures here.