Quote:
Originally Posted by Infinity2718
Just curious if you can explain your team's design decisions on going with belts over chain for drive train. I don't have much experience with belts in a drive application, it would be helpful to understand the thought process.
It seems like there is a lot of caution with your advice on belted drives, and chain seems like the superior approach with this guidance.
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It isn't as dreary as I paint it. We have just been recently thinking about how to get that last bit of reliability and performance out of our drive train, so this has been on my mind.
971 uses belts primarily because the pulleys integrate into our design better than a sprocket (we can bore out and glue modified COTS pulleys into our integrated wheel module, where there isn't a COTS sprocket that I know of that we could make do this). Beyond that, there is a nice benefit that belts are lighter than chain and run pretty quiet. If we ran a WCD, I would run #25 chain like 254 does. It turns out that #25 is also out of spec for a drive application, but it appears to handle it more gracefully.