Quote:
Originally Posted by compwiztobe
The last two years our team has used short segments of some Delrin rod we have lying around as tensioners. We mount the flat face of a cylindrical segment with a bolt off center, making somewhat of a cam, and then the round face is against the chain. The cam part allows us to just loosen the bolt, rotate the Delrin to retension the chain, and tighten it back up. Depending on the fastening method, the tensioner can rotate slightly when tight, which just means more frequent maintenance, but I think a little Loctite fixes this. This allows for an inch or so of tensioning and is fairly robust and lasts a while if done properly.
Attached is a screenshot of a rough CAD model of it in SolidWorks. The chain runs under the cylindrical Delrin rod, which is mounted horizontally to the aluminum angle which is then mounted to a frame rail or other structural element. You could even mount the Delrin straight onto the frame somewhere if it works out.
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We have used this exact same setup ourselves for the two years we've been doing 2992. Also, those two years are the only years that we've not had a chain issue at all. Some sort of tensioner has been a lesson learned for us and something we plan to carry into the future.
As for the original post's floating tensioner, we used two very similar tensioners with great success on our super chain driven 2009 bot. They were made out of white nylon. Since we used them on the vertical positioned chains we didn't even have to move them or maintain them as gravity did that job for us. Here's a photo.
