art,
I realize the efficiency loss and think I can live with it.
We are planning on water jetting these side plates (well, manually drill the bushing holes to get right diameter and just have the jet mark them with a 1/8 hole) so the material would have to be aluminum.
Thanks for correcting me on my math. That was a pretty stupid mistake on my part
This is not exactly a final version of my gearbox so I have room for error
I also used about 1.5 times the torque that the application worked beautifully at so I should be fine.
I am probably going to switch to bearings on the first stage.
After some cheeseholing I got the weight of the whole gearbox down to 2.5 pounds w/o motors.
thanks, Vivek