[Kevin Sevcik]

Aww drat, a serious question. I was hoping to string people along for a bit longer. This is actually the frame for our ball intake, with 8" pneumatics outside instead of 4" colsons inside.

In answer to your actual question, our chassis is also 6wd west coast pneumatics., still on 1x2. Our usual solution is wheels outside belts inside. Any inner cross pieces are bolted to the top of the wheel rails. A belt on a 30 tooth pulley will just barely sneak underneath the top of a 1x2. With smaller wheels, we'd run a smaller pulley, but a 24 tooth on 8" wheels would be trouble. I'm mildly concerned about 9mm wide belts on the 30s as it is. We're going to seriously exercise things and see if we need to move up to 15mm wide.

I know other options are to make a belly pan and run belts just above that, or square up your frame with cross pieces fore and aft of the belt paths.

If you drastically over size your belts, you could probably get away with running them around cross pieces that would need removing to replace the belts if I did that, I'd also leave 2 spares also trapped around the cross pieces and ready to slide over and replace a broken belt. And make sure the cross piece is removable over a lunch break.

As for chain, it's been a while since we've had a chain drive. Maintenance on chain drives was trying and failures were costly. We switched to belts a few years back and haven't looked back.