A.M. Metal builds custom flexible duct connectors from scratch in our South Williamsport, Pennsylvania shop, and has for more than 45 years. Round, square, rectangular and oval, from roughly 3 inches across on up with no practical ceiling. Built to your flange measurements, in the metal your application calls for, with a conveyor belt and Kevlar flex that outlasts the canvas most connectors are made from.
If one just blew apart and your system is down, call the shop today. For most applications we can build it and install it the same day. If you are putting in a new system, send us the drawings and we will build the connector into the job. Same shop, same part, same people either way.
We ship anywhere in the United States and Canada. If you are handling your own installation, distance is not a factor at all, and a great deal of what we build leaves here on a truck.
We also install. Our crews cover Pennsylvania and the surrounding region: Lycoming, Tioga, Columbia, Bradford, Sullivan, Clinton, Montour, Union and Northumberland counties, along with New York, New Jersey, Ohio, Maryland, West Virginia and Delaware. For the right project we go farther, and we have gone as far as Connecticut, South Carolina and Florida.
A flexible connector is the short, deliberately non-rigid section that sits between a fan and the piping system. It looks like a small thing. It is doing three jobs at once.
A fan shakes. Without a break in the line, that shake runs straight into your ductwork and into the building structure. The connector absorbs it instead, which protects both the fan and the duct.
Metal grows and shrinks with heat, and over a long run it adds up to more than people expect. Equipment settles. Two flanges that lined up on installation day will not line up forever. The connector takes up that movement so the duct is not fighting the fan.
Some of what you hear from a running system is structure-borne, traveling down rigid metal. Break the metal path and you cut the noise with it.
That is the whole job.It is also why the part matters out of all proportion to what it costs: it is one of the cheapest components in the system and one of the very few that can stop the entire thing when it goes.
Most of the calls we get on flex connectors sound about the same. Something was running fine. The connector let go. Now the line is down and somebody has to answer for how long it stays down.
We know how that call goes because we take it constantly. It usually starts with some version of “we were running last night and it blew apart, how fast can you get us one.” That is the real question, and everything else is secondary to it.
So that is what we built the process around. We keep the design simple and refined enough that we are not engineering from a blank page every time somebody calls. We stock the belt material. We make our own cutout rings. When the measurements come in, we can move fast, because on this part speed is most of the value.
Here is the part nobody likes to say out loud: almost nobody replaces one of these before it fails. In all the years we have been building them, we have never had a customer call to say a connector was looking rough and they wanted to get ahead of it. We have walked into plants running duct tape and gorilla tape on a connector that gave up weeks ago. Preventative maintenance on this part is close to a myth, which is exactly why turnaround matters more than anything else we could tell you.
We build the complete connector, not just the metal parts for somebody else’s belt. You give us the flange measurements and we build to them.
There is no minimum order. If you need exactly one connector, we will build exactly one. We are not going to make you buy a batch to get a part.
And if you would rather do the install yourself, we ship. Anywhere in the United States and Canada.
Both, and they are not different products.
This is where our connectors part company with what you will find in a catalog.
We do not use canvas. We use conveyor belt material with Kevlar in it, cut from a roll we keep in the shop. It is dense and tough enough that a knife will not touch it. We have to shear it.
That is not a detail we chose for the sake of being different. It is a response to what these connectors actually run. We build them for paper operations at the light end and for foundries moving garnet and sand at the heavy end. Material traveling at speed is abrasive, and in an abrasive stream the belt is always the first thing to go. So we build the belt to be the part that does not.
We over design these. That is a deliberate choice, and it is why they seldom come apart.
Canvas connectors are cheaper, and for a clean air stream with nothing abrasive moving through it, they can be perfectly adequate. There is no reason to pay for more belt than your application needs, and if that is your situation we will tell you.
The tradeoff shows up in three places. When there is material in the air, thin belt wears from the inside. When the connector is outdoors taking weather and sun, it dry rots, gets brittle and starts to crack. And when the system runs hard, constant vibration works on it every hour it operates. Eventually it lets go, usually with no warning, and that is when the call comes in.
Worth thinking about before you compare prices: the part is usually the small half of the cost. A changeout means shutting the system down, getting access to the connector, and the labor to swap it out. Sometimes it means more than that. When that is the real number you are spending, the version that fails first is not the cheaper one, it is just the one with the smaller invoice on the front end.
The picture here is a temporary fix built on site. It will keep a system running, but a shop built connector lasts longer and is what we would recommend.
An internal sleeve is a metal liner that sits inside the connector. It is the single biggest difference between a connector that survives an abrasive application and one that does not, and most people buying a connector have never had it explained to them.
Here is how ours is built. The sleeve is welded in at the flow side and slipped over on the other side, so it stays free to move with the connector instead of fighting it. The result is that material coming through only ever touches metal. It never touches the belt at all.
On heavy duty work the sleeve comes standard. On a clean application like a paper line it is optional, and if you do not need one we will say so rather than sell you one. The rule of thumb is about as simple as it gets: heavy or abrasive material, you want a sleeve.
We do not usually have to talk anybody into it, because we ask what is moving through the system and build accordingly. But when somebody calls for a straight replacement on a line running something aggressive, we will stop and explain the option. It costs slightly more. It lasts substantially longer. On the right application that is not a close call.
Either way you have a mess, and depending on what you are running it is more than a mess. Dust escaping a duct into a workspace is a recognized hazard, and OSHA publishes on the risks of combustible dust for exactly that reason.
We will be straight with you about the limits of this. A sleeve does not make a connector last forever. Nothing does. These wear out eventually, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something. What a sleeve buys you is time, and the assurance that when the belt finally does wear, you are not standing in front of a wide open hole in your system.
Every metal expands as it heats and contracts as it cools, and they do not all move at the same rate. Aluminum moves the most.Stainless steel moves noticeably more than carbon or galvanized steel. Over a few feet you would never notice. Over a long run it adds up fast.
One hundred feet of stainless-steel duct on a roof, taking hot sun on the outside and a hot airstream on the inside, can expand half an inch or more. On longer runs, we have seen several inches. Then the system goes cold overnight and all of it comes back.
Without somewhere for that movement to go, the duct flexes and buckles at the seams. That is how a run tear itself apart over a few seasons, and it can take equipment and building structure with It. A flexible connector is the relief. It absorbs the growth so the duct is not fighting itself.
Not every run needs a connector, and we would rather tell you that than sell you one. You can often skip it when:
Tell us the application and we will tell you honestly whether it needs one.
The single most common problem we catch, before anything gets built, is the flange.
People assume the fan flange and the duct flange are the same. They usually are not. Different overall dimension, different hole pattern, different hole sizes. It is one of those things that seems like it ought to be standardized and simply is not.
It normally goes like this. The ductwork comes off, the old fitting is out, and the call comes in asking for a 24 by 24 inch connector. Reasonable request. But the fan opening turns out to be slightly larger, or a different shape entirely. What that job actually needs is a transition off the fan, or a connector with the transition built into it.
We build both, and it is a great deal easier to sort out before anything is fabricated than after. If you are not certain, send us the flange pattern and the dimensions of both sides, or have us come out and field measure it. We would rather measure once than build twice, and so would you.
We are not brokering these out. Everything happens under our roof, on our equipment, which is a large part of why we can move fast when the clock matters.
The conveyor belt material we use cannot be cut with a knife, so the shear is not a nice-to-have on this part, it is a requirement.
Round, oval and the curved work.
The flanges and the rectangular work.
Cutout rings, hole patterns, and anything that has to match an existing bolt pattern exactly.
Including the sleeve work, where the weld on the flow side is what lets the other end float.
Coatings applied here, so parts leave ready to install.
Coordinated for anywhere in the US and Canada.
What we will not do is oversell the machinery. There is no single exotic machine that makes these possible. What makes ours different is a design we have refined over a very long time and repeated more times than we can count, built out of material most shops do not put in a connector. The equipment is how we deliver it quickly.
We quote every connector, because every one is built to your measurements. There is no price list, and any shop that gives you one is selling you a stock size and hoping it fits.
What actually moves the number:
The fastest way to a real number is to tell us what is going through it. Once we know that, we can tell you what it should be built from and what it will cost, usually in the same conversation.
Anywhere there is a fan and a collection system. If it moves air and it is made of metal, there is a connector in it somewhere.
The most common locations are fan inlets and outlets and pressure blower inlets and outlets. Beyond that we build for bag house inlets and outlets, scrubbers, dryers, general ventilation, and effectively anything else running duct.
The industries we build for most:
We are not only a parts supplier, and on this particular part that distinction matters.
A connector has to bolt to an opening on equipment that is already in place, already running, and already worn. Drawings from the original installation may or may not still be accurate. We field services measure, we fabricate, and we send our own crews to install, which means there is one company accountable from the measurement to the bolt-up.
Some jobs cannot be done any other way. We have built and installed a connector on site because the finished part was physically larger than the only doorway into the room. It had to be measured there, built there, and assembled in place. A parts supplier cannot solve that problem from a catalog.
We ship flexible connectors anywhere in the United States and Canada. If you are equipped to handle your own installation, distance is not a factor at all, and a great deal of what we build leaves the shop on a truck.
For installation work, our crews travel. We have built and installed as far out as Connecticut, South Carolina and Florida when the project justified it.
Closer to home, we are based in South Williamsport, Pennsylvania and serve Lycoming, Tioga, Columbia, Bradford, Sullivan, Clinton, Montour, Union and Northumberland counties, along with New York, New Jersey, Ohio, Maryland, West Virginia and Delaware. Within reach of the shop, same day is realistic. Outside it, tell us where you are and we will give you an honest answer on how fast we can be there.
Jeremy Poague brings more than 20 years of industrial experience as a field mechanic, welder, shop fabricator and dust collection specialist, on top of 15 years of military service and two tours in Iraq as a United States Marine.
A.M. Metal has been fabricating in South Williamsport for more than 45 years, formerly as AM Sheet Metal, Inc. Hundreds of businesses rely on the shop. The people who build your connector are the same people who can come measure it and install it, which matters more on this part than on most.
Replaced. Once the belt has torn, split or gone brittle, patching buys very little time and you will be back at it shortly. We have walked into plants running duct tape and gorilla tape on a failed connector, and it is always a short term fix on a part that is going to be swapped anyway. Better to swap it once, properly, with the right belt in it.
From a shop that builds them. Stock sizes only help if your opening happens to match one, and openings on real equipment frequently do not. Send us the flange measurements for both sides and we will build to those numbers, in any shape, with no minimum order.
For most applications, same day for manufacture and installation. Farther from the shop, roughly 48 hours depending on location. If you are handling your own install, we can ship. Call and tell us where you are and what failed.
They are different products entirely, and the names get mixed up constantly. Flex duct is the insulated flexible hose used to run air over a distance. A flexible duct connector is a short section that joins a fan to rigid ductwork so vibration and movement do not transfer into the system. You will also hear it called a flex connector, a canvas connector, a vibration joint or an expansion joint. Same part.
Flex hose is a third thing again. It is the flexible hose running from a system to a workstation or a tool, and it is something we supply rather than fabricate. If that is what you need, say so and we will quote it.
Usually because the material was too light for what was going through it. Abrasive material wears a thin belt from the inside out, vibration works on it every hour the system runs, and weather and sun dry rot it from the outside. Nothing lasts forever in that environment. What the belt is made of, and whether there is a sleeve behind it, decides how long you get.
If the material moving through is heavy or abrasive, yes. If you are running a clean air stream, often not, and we will tell you so rather than sell you one you do not need. Tell us what is going through it and we will tell you what the application actually calls for.
Send us the flange measurements for both sides. Or your drawings. Or just call and tell us what failed and what is running through it, and we will help you work out what it should be. New build or emergency replacement, one unit or a full system, install by our crew or shipped to your dock. Tell us what you need and how fast you need it. If you need it today, say so when you call and we will tell you straight whether we can hit it.
