Belts vs. Chains

[deshirider430]

Team 612 has originally been using chains, but after many problems in 2005 including tensioning problems, chain slippage, and chains breaking we switched to belts and pulleys in 2006.

Simply the greatest decision we have ever made.

Our kevlar belts are stronger, lighter, quieter, more robust, and less prone to slipping and snapping. Once we used ours last year we didn't have a single problem through 2 regionals, championship, and tons of offseason practice. The only problem was our wheels being to weak . We have changed that this year with a more robust wheel design. The only big change we have made was the belt teeth shape, we went from rectangles to trapezoids to handle the 4 cims we are putting on them.

You guys trust the belts in your car right?

[roboticWanderor]

there are lots of factors that are common for both chain and belt:
stretch, slippage, tension, surface area on the pulley/sprocket, weight, maintenance, and load capacity.
Gates has a good informative page(albeit a bit biased i think ) on the pros and cons of belt and chain drive systems.
it seems that chain is a more forgiving design wise, allowing for some mistakes in tensioning and load distribution.

[AndyH]

I believe that it depends on the drive deisgn. Just have to keep the specs in mind when choosing the application. We used #25 on our racerbot. (see topics, St Louis Regional & 1098 Ferrari) We had great sucess with it on the drive, 6:1 single stage reduction from 2 CIM motors per wheel. Only threw chain when we took a direct hit on the wheel at speed. We kept going as we were running 4 CIM motors, and ackerman steering. We could get 20.7 fps on th field.

Had a great time at St Louis Regional and congrats to the champs!

[Sam N.]

Originally Posted by Redbull2486

cables

not for high-speed applications though.

in the early 1900s all the big machinery used cables.