Quote:
Originally Posted by Chris is me
It's really worth noting that specs are pretty conservative numbers based on thousands of hours of runtime. FRC robots run for a tiny fraction of that, hence why hundreds of teams each year run 25 chain or HTD belts without any failures. 35 chain may not be a bad choice, but I think nearly any robotics team who can keep sprockets in line with each other and chain in reasonable tension can handle #25. It's really not as finicky as people make it out to be. If you can mill exact centers, 15mm belts are a good solution; I haven't personally heard of any failures of wide belts yet.
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I certainly wouldn't say that either #25 or 15mm belts are bad solutions; 3061 had used both while I was on the team.
That said, I've had much more success running #35 than #25 or belts - every year that we've had belts or #25 we've required milled floating or slot tensioners to keep everything nice and tight.
I would agree that belt failures are very, very rare - I've personally never even heard of a belt snapping. However, belt slippage is something that happens very commonly to younger teams due to a lack of proper tensioning or miscalculated center distances.
Perhaps robust was the wrong word; maybe I was looking for foolproof? IMO anyways, it's much much harder to mess up #35. It could be that with the newer solutions that have come out, like versablocks, belt tensioning is easier than it was in past years.