[MrForbes]

I don't know how your harvester is set up, so this may or may not help. We made a single stage gearbox for a Fisher Price motor, then used chain drive to run a roller. The round urethane belting goes up to an idler roller at the top. Ball compression is kind of low at the bottom, maybe an inch, and increase as the balls go up, so they pop out the back at the top.

The gearbox was easy for us to make. We used an older FP gearbox first stage gear, and a 3/8" hex shaft with the ends machined round to fit into the flanged bearings. We just measured carefully and drilled the holes in the Lexan using a drill press. The ball moves about 4 feet up in about a second, which is what we designed it to do. To figure out the gear and chain ratios, we started with that one second time requirement, then figured the needed belt speed. We used that to figure out the gear and chain reduction needed to get the roller to spin that fast based on the no load RPM of the motor, allowing for about 20% speed reduction when it's run with load.


We had zero problems with the mechanism through two regionals.