Long-travel belt actuators: 1,000 to 3,000 mm

The most common request the engine can't fill from a single catalog SKU is 1,500–2,200 mm of belt travel. Here is where the catalog stops, what happens past that line, and how to get a real answer instead of a dead end.

Single-unit catalog limits

Beyond 1,275 mm, belt stretch, carriage-support span, and frame deflection all grow faster than travel. That doesn't make 1,880 mm impossible; it makes it an engineered system rather than a part number.

Three ways past 1,275 mm

Tandem rails. Two actuators in series along a common support, with the carriage bridging them — the standard answer for 1.5–2.5 m with modest payloads. Dual-drive gantry. For wide spans with a bridge, two synchronized belt actuators carry the bridge; the engine sizes each motor for half the moving mass. Rack-and-pinion or linear-motor stage. For 3 m+ and heavy loads (a 3,600 mm, 360 kg stage came through the chat last quarter), belt is the wrong drive; this is a quoted engineered system with a 600 mm rail gauge and a different motor class.

How the engine handles an out-of-range request

It sizes anyway. Ask for 1,880 mm and it names the closest SKU (SBA90 at 1,275 mm), quantifies the gap, checks rail gauge and motor frame, and hands you a direct contact for the engineered path — never a bare "contact engineering." If you're an engineer with a drawing, that call is thirty minutes, not a week.

Sizing the drive at long travel

Long moves are dominated by speed, not acceleration: at 2,000 mm and 500 mm/s a move is about 4.25 s, so throughput falls to a few cycles a minute regardless of motor. Where the motor matters is the inertia of the longer belt and the carriage-plus-payload mass; the engine includes both and flags inertia mismatch above 10:1.