Home Forums General Discussion Technical Questions Lang Lay Ropes or Regular Lay?

Hey everyone. We have a job with 9 Units all the same machine and vintage. 5 have Right regular lay ropes 1/2" 8x19 and 4 have Lang Lay 1/2' 8x19. These are late 1970's Dover/Turnbull basement traction with 3E machines. None of the cars have the original cartop data tag stating which ropes are correct. The Sheaves are undercut U-Groove. Does anybody know which type are correct? or how I could find out?

Lang Lay are a better rope for a basement traction as they are more flexible and handle the double or backward bend better. But either rope will work on a basement traction,. HW provides regular lay on their machines.
The U-Grove undercut can be for either rope, but is needed for the lang lay.
TK Spares may be able to dig up the original build sheets to see what was supplied.
Any signed or either being reroped but not the other?

I would get an engineer to preform a traction calculation. You will most likely need to weigh the cars & cwts to do this properly. At Otis Lang lay was only used on sheaves with liners. I have seen lots of units over the years where Lang lay was used but not spec'd. The only reason to use Lang lay is for more traction but seems like a bandaid fix. Lang lay will wear sheaves much faster than regular lay. I would try obtaining the original layouts from TK. possible the customer or AHJ might have them as well.