Chrome Industries Hub, Minneapolis

Project Brief

• Size: 3022 sf (281 sq m)

• Location: Minneapolis MN, USA

• Role: Project Co-owner, design including all fixtures and built-ins, project execution and budgets.  

Project Highlights

A Conveyor in the Air

Every Chrome Hub features a garment conveyor, always sourced used, usually from a defunct dry cleaning business. Rather than hold thousands of garments, or even apparel, Chrome uses the conveyors to hold backpack and messenger bag back-stock. Once acquired, the conveyors are modified in whatever way necessary to harmonize the unit with the store design I come up with. Chrome Minneapolis was the largest conveyor installation at 42 ft long (12.8m) (twice that in total hook space) and definitely posed the most complex store environment integration. Typically, the conveyor needs to be high to preserve shopable space below while providing a “V-dip” to allow staff to load and unload the product. Here’s the plan I came up with:

To maximize shopable space below, I didn't want to use any of the supporting columns typically employed in a dry-cleaner application. This in itself was a challenge as a 42 ft long steel garment conveyor on its own is heavy --and once fully laden with product it weighs more than a car. The existing building dates from the early twentieth century and its exterior walls, where the conveyor would be mounted, are made from a soft local brick.  The design called for putting the conveyor in near total cantilever off the wall. To do this I needed some really stout brackets. I partnered with Erik Noren of Peacock Groove Cycles to fabricate the steel per my design and he did a beautiful job. The resulting welding was so beautiful, I was sorry the “stacked dimes” would be out of site with the brackets 14ft (4.3m) up in the air. 

We set about the loud, tedious, dusty and messy operation of bolting the brackets into the soft masonry wall, This involved drilling 16" (41cm) holes into the pale brick, setting special plastic tube screens and then epoxying threaded rod into the holes. The screens limit the epoxy dripping out into internal void spaces in the wall and work very well.  It took a lot of patience but the result was incredibly stiff. 

With the brackets installed, we began to hang the heavy conveyor components to them, piece by piece. The conveyor is essentially a long chain hung from wheeled carriers that run along a tube steel rail. The links of the chain are 12” (30.5 cm) long sections guided by large sprockets at either end of the conveyor, one of which is powered. The basic design for the system was established by the White Conveyor Company in the 1960’s and has not changed much since. These systems usually require site welding and since the chain links can’t stretch or shrink, the system must be adjusted to make sure the rail is exactly as long as the number of links in the chain in 1 foot increments. 

In the end, I decided to add some safety connections to the ceiling structure above. However, since the floor above was occupied by an architectural office (and our landlord), I used vibration isolators to limit the sound transmission when the conveyor was running. Happily, once the chain was loaded onto the rail and the system tuned and lubed, it worked perfectly. And the architects never complained of noise.