[RyanN]

Originally Posted by M. Krass

Well, I guess I'm trying to find out what sort of advice or experience folks have with such an arrangement -- which is really just an extreme case for what I have on my model. It seems to me that, as you increase chain wrap with such a setup, you correspondingly increase the chain's desire to tear the idler off its mount entirely. I'm just curious to learn what folks have found to be a happy medium or that I'm concerned for nothing.

Well, this is true. We broke the shaft holding on our idler last year, but it was really a bad design flaw because the metal was so thin where it broke. The amount of force on the idler is a lot (I think our engineer was saying that we had over 400lbs of force on our idler) We ended up replacing our lathe built idler bolt assembly with just a plain 'ole bolt that worked for the rest of the regional.