When CertainTeed Corporation’s Kansas City insulation plant set out to build the world’s most modern insulation production line, planners envisioned what others thought impractical if not impossible, producing spun fiber glass in a 12-ft (3.65m)-wide stream on a conveyor line that spreads out into a single belt 24-ft. (7.3m) wide.

      Their vision became CertainTeed’s K21 production line, a continuous transformation from molten glass to packaged goods that rides a quarter-mile-long sequence of 93 conveyor belts, the industry’s longest and widest.  With so many places where things can go wrong and spoil its volume-production advantage, K21 challenged maintenance management in finding ways to first, minimize the constant threat of belt failures, and second, find the fastest, easiest way to recover from those that evade prevention.  Today, belt availability around 97 percent shows that challenge well met.

      Conveyor uptime is the Holy Grail here.  Much wider than the next-biggest insulation lines anywhere, K21 is the primary support for CertainTeed’s expansion of market share.  Dedicated to producing light-density building insulation ranging from R11 to R38, in both kraft-faced and unfaced batts and rolls, K21 offers flexibility to change products quickly or run different lengths and widths simultaneously.

            Combining K21’s capability with two conventional 6' wide production lines K11 and K12, the Kansas City plant annually supplies enough material to insulate about 1 million homes, plus a variety of specialized insulation products for metal buildings and other commercial applications such as HVAC duct wrap.  With 1.7 million square feet under roof, it’s the biggest of four CertainTeed insulation plants in the United States — all part of the diverse global enterprise of France’s Saint-Gobain Group, world’s largest glass and fiber glass manufacturer — and  ranks among the largest and...

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