Timing belt in drive success

[AdamHeard]

Jake, it must be awful nice to be able to get the finish from the EDM.

I'm hoping the milled profile works for us, I can't imagine it won't with how low our runtimes are (even on practice bot) compared to industry. I wouldn't be surprised if it leads to a bit of belt wear. I'd be willing to swap some down the road.

Our dream is to run 5mm pitch gt2 9mm wide in 24T with exact c-c; per the math this is marginal, so our expectations is that our prototype will fail. We would then run with tensioners.

We're machining our pulleys in one shot into a large block (as attached). We then will hold these on a mandrel to lathe the rear side to length and diameter at size. At this point a flange is generated. For the other flange we will bolt on a .032" plate (easy for us to router) with #4-40s.

987 had a very cool process for their large pulley that we plan to copy for large and less critical pulleys in the future. They picked the drillsize closest to the proper radius for the root of the teeth, and drilled all the teeth. They then used a mill cutter capable of an undercut to remove the top of this material all the way around leaving a flange.

We used the same process as you for cutting plate gears this season, in 24, 20 and 16DP. They initially look nasty, but quickly wore smooth. We LOVED it, and probably cut over 100 gears. I'm sure you guys did as well.




RC, for 2mm and 3mm pitch gt2 we primarily used 6mm wide. I really need to clean up Encore's CAD to a quality I can post so teams can see how timing belt is really easy to effectively integrate. Utilizing this smaller belts (which are still KILLER strong if you use them right) we were able to package much larger reductions in smaller packages than possible with #25 chain.