Switched from roller guides to slide guides on a Schindler 330A after fighting with noise complaints for 6 months

I've been an Otis guy my whole career and always thought roller guides were the way to go, but a building manager in Denver kept calling me back every 3 weeks about rail chatter. After I swapped in a set of Kone slide guides last month, the car runs dead quiet and the manager hasn't called once. Has anyone else had better luck with slide guides on high-rise residential elevators?

3 comments

3 Comments

the_wyatt26d ago

Wait, hold up. You swapped in Kone slide guides on a Schindler 330A? That's wild lol, I didn't think those parts would even bolt up without some serious fab work. Honestly, I'm kinda shocked you got them to fit at all. Roller guides are supposed to be the standard for high-rises because of the speed, but you're saying the slides are dead quiet? Man, that's making me second guess everything I know about rail noise. I've been dealing with a similar complaint on a 330A in downtown Phoenix for like eight months now, and this is making me wonder if I've been overthinking it.

wendy39126d ago

Yeah "roller guides are supposed to be the standard" but I once saw a guy fix a whole noisy elevator with nothing but a can of WD40 and a rubber mallet.

patriciah5126d ago

the_wyatt, you mentioned "roller guides are supposed to be the standard for high-rises because of the speed" and that's mostly true, but not exactly. On a 330A running at like 500 feet per minute or slower (which most residential high-rises top out at), slide guides are actually fine. The speed thing matters more when you're talking about 800+ fpm towers where the car might skip a rail joint. I've seen Otis spec slides on their 2000 series for buildings up to 20 floors with zero issues. So it's not as wild as it sounds. The Kone slides I used did need a little shimming on the mounting bracket, maybe a quarter inch, no serious fab work. The real secret is the guide shoe material - the newer composite stuff just eats vibration way better than rollers on poorly aligned rails.