How to make a 4 lane to 2 lane Balancer

[kyletheinilater]

As the title suggests I am looking for how to take 4 lanes of Iron ore in my case and turn it into two lanes so that I can smelt it and I'm not sure how to do that. will making a triangle with the splitters work that easily? (See attacked Picture

4 lanes into two but I doubt this works for maximum efficiency

4-2.PNG (401.77 KiB) Viewed 12501 times

)

[dog80]

its always helpfull when working on lane balancers to see them in action...

[jcranmer]

Just having the three splitters at the end is sufficient for most use cases. It won't give you full output if all of the input is coming in along solely from one half of the input belts, but you can generally feed the inputs such that the emptier belts feed the outside and the fuller belts feed the inside, so it doesn't really matter.

[darkfrei]

Are you need to keep the 100% throughput by only any 2 input belts?
https://wiki.factorio.com/File:4to4_bal ... t_demo.gif

[Pi-C]

will making a triangle with the splitters work that easily? (See attacked Picture4-2.PNG)

Should work. If you don't like that there will be some ore remaining at the end of the two outer lanes, you could add two 2-to-1 balancers after the 4-by-4 balancer:

4x24.png (531.17 KiB) Viewed 12464 times

[mrvn]

Don't forget that splitters can have priority input and output. On a bus it's helpful to add splitters with input and output priority to the left (or right if you prefer that side) so the left most lane is always full and you can split of from that.

Also don't forget to balance the sides of the belts like Pi-C showed.

[kyletheinilater]

Thanks for the help guys!

[Serenity]

Don't forget that splitters can have priority input and output. On a bus it's helpful to add splitters with input and output priority to the left (or right if you prefer that side) so the left most lane is always full and you can split of from that.

Yeah, that's what I do for my main bus. And it's easy to see how far it is depleted. Belt balancers still have their uses for train stations for example, but you don't need them everywhere anymore