Ordering Belts

[sanddrag]

Originally Posted by Cory

We used round urethane belting from McMaster on our robot (5/16" diameter--major overkill). I believe they told us to order 10% shorter than we needed, due to the belts stretching. Do NOT trust this number. It is more like 2-5%.

The process we had to go through to mount the belts on our rollers was incredibly hard, and downright dangerous, due to how little they stretched. We had to put one side on our roller, and then use a set of ratcheting tie down straps to pull the other roller towards it's mount on our subframe, until we could line up the roller with the shaft. There was an incredible amount of tension on the roller while doing this--I don't even want to think about what would have happened if one of the straps gave way before we got the shaft in.

In addition, this caused our ball pickup system to be horribly inefficient. We probably lost 30% or more due to friction.

Heh, wow. Thanks for the details. I've always wondered how you guys got those on. Yeah, I was looking over those belts quite a bit on 968's and they did seem fairly hard and not stretchy. Kirk said McMaster will fuse them for you at any length. I reckon you probably have to call them to set that up eh?