Is Anyone Successfully Shooting with a Belt?

[wilful]

We tried using belt to shoot frisbees, they didn't work. The solid metal pulleys do not compress, neither do the frisbees. This causes problems achieving enough friction to throw the frisbee.

[Aren Siekmeier]

See http://www.fightingcalculators.org/blog/?p=91 and the rest of our blog. In concept, the belt shooter was far more attractive to us than a wheel shooter, so we focused on making it work over other designs that took fewer iterations, and are now very happy with what we've come up with, and moving forward with the competition design (with no illusion of it being final).

[Orion.DeYoe]

We prototyped a belt shooter. We used 6 in. wheels for the rollers and direct drove it from a CIM. We used the orange urethane belt (just like the polycord everyone used last year, except flat) for the belt.
As soon as we powered it up we noticed a huge problem. When you get the CIM up to full speed (the kind of speed you would need to launch a frisbee a reasonable distance) the centrifugal force caused the belt to "float" off of the rollers.
We did some more work on the prototype and put in a ridiculously tight tensioner to keep the belt on the rollers. Then we ran the launcher at about 60% power. We were able to get 20-25 feet of distance launching at ~30 degrees.
This distance could be enough for some applications, but not for others. We're planning to prototype a two-wheeled shooter next.
We figured that if we got some belts that wouldn't stretch then we could use those, but our options seem to be pretty limited as to the belts we can get.
My conclusion? Yes, belts can be made to work, but you could waste a lot of time trying to get it to work consistently. Time that might be better spent on designing and building a good climbing mechanism.