[Brandon Holley]

Originally Posted by lilstogi11

I would suggest asking someone on team 125 for help. I know they have experience with belt drives and the tensioning involved. ask Brandon Holley perhaps.

http://www.chiefdelphi.com/media/photos/30256

Thanks for the shout out akash.

While I am no expert, I did spend a considerable amount of time this past season working with belts. We used .200" pitch, .375" wide kevlar reinforced timing belts from www.sdp-si.com. We finally had a belt go down after the beantown blitz this year (2 regionals and 2 off-season events).

The thing about a belt is even though ours were kevlar reinforced, they are just plastic teeth. Keeping them tight will help a considerable amount, and I am pretty sure you guys did to have the belt(s) last as long as they have.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fatigue_(material) <---- FATIGUE.

Fatigue is basically repeated stress over a relatively long period of time. Even though your belts may not have seen any greatly large shock loads, seeing small loads over an entire FIRST season probably fatigued the material in the belt enough that it finally broke.

Congrats on making it this far into a season before having to change them!

Hope it helps.

Brando