pic: Another Belt-In-Tube Drivetrain

[Cothron Theiss]

Originally Posted by Chris is me

In a drivetrain, with HTD belts, 24T pulleys and 9mm wide belts are riding on the edge of feasibility - these drives tend to fail belts by ratcheting and eventually tensile failure. I haven't experimentally determined how small of a pulley you can go to in order to safely use a 15mm wide belt - I'm sure I could estimate it with some math, I just haven't done it. I seem to recall 18T pulleys would cause 15mm belts to skip in a drivetrain, but I don't remember if that was speculation I heard someone else say or something actually based on real world experience.

Hm, it would be nice to know whether an 18t HTD pulley will work with 15mm wide belts. I'm currently working on a WCD that would be using that setup, so I have a bit of a vested interest. For your purposes, since you're already machining your pulleys out of stock, couldn't you switch to GT3 belts and GT2 pulleys? there's not a huge difference, but it would give you some margin of safety for the the setups that are on the cusp of failure.