1" Bore Timing Pulleys

[craigboez]

Originally Posted by artdutra04

Using a lathe, you can just buy pulley stock and make your own 1in bore pulleys. For example #A 6A24M024TM20 from SDP-SI is 24t 5mm HTD aluminum pulley stock. From this you drill in the ID of your choice and then wafer off individual pulleys with a parting tool.

If you go this route, always try to design around sprockets with a multiple-of-three number of teeth; this way it'll be much easier to clamp the pulley stock into a 3-jaw chuck since the soft jaws will all align to the same phase of the pulleyteeth.

You make this sound fairly easy. Working with pulley stock has always looked like a lot of hassle to me. We have a G0602 bench top lathe, so I think this would be tricky for us to handle in house. Are there any other tips to working with these? And what is the intention of the shank that comes as part of the pulley stock?