Conveyor Belt

[MrForbes]

Originally Posted by JesseK

My tip: stay away from Lowe's and Home Depot when in a search of local hardware stores; they're too big and you'll spend way too much time looking for the right thing. Start with the mom and pop shops that are small and have everything closer together without all of the non-relevant items in between them.

Great advice! I love looking at what the locally owned/operated Ace hardware store has on the shelves. They even got in some really nice Baltic Birch plywood, just in time for our final chassis build

[Japper]

Originally Posted by jmarsh24

Im looking for some urethane belting material and am trying to find a cost effective way of bonding the stuff. Anyone have any ideas?

We are having some great success with our conveyor which we constructed a belt from a plastic carpet runner cut down to size and riveted together so that the knubby side is out... ours works great with one bottom belt running on smooth bearing rollers (the drive roller has a pool noodle glued to it) and the other surface that the ball contacts on the top of the ball is simply a piece of a flat foam PVC panel with the anti-slip mat glued to it...

Our conveyor is driven very fast by a modified FP motor which I detialed in another post:

http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/sh...t=72513&page=2

[cgredalertcc]

Originally Posted by jmarsh24

Im looking for some urethane belting material and am trying to find a cost effective way of bonding the stuff. Anyone have any ideas?

I'm not sure exactly what it is you are using, but if it is hollow they make barbed connectors that the tubing slides onto either end of. They are extremely strong: it took another mentor and I to pull it apart. If it is polycord they sell the welding kit, but that is $300, so it isn't terribly cost effective.

Best of luck

[JesseK]

Yesterday we got in our two test materials, and they work like a charm when used together. I will say that we don't intend for our conveyor to go extremely fast like some people have posted, so YMMV for this setup.

The first is a nylon mesh, with tiny holes. With a belt that's 6" wide, this stuff simply does not break. After putting a sample in the vise and yanking on it, and on two glued pieces, all we found was that we were getting more and more tired of trying to break the stuff. It showed no signs of fatigue, neither on the material nor on the glued join. However, it does not grip the ball like I though it would.

The second material is a neoprene mesh. It turns out that the mesh has 'teeth' that grip the ball ridiculously well in one direction, yet it has a worse grip than the nylon in the other direction...I wonder what we can use that for... It's downside is that it is extremely fragile.

But combine the two with some hot glue... and BAM a ridiculously strong, flexible, lightweight belt that is cheap ($40) and easy to make (don't stretch the neoprene when bonding the two though!). We also have a small sample of the two materials expoxied together, so tomorrow we'll see how well that worked out.

/edit
I should also add that we're using this material as a tread to drive the belt.

[Black Claw]

we're doing a conveyor belt design and i need to know what kind of motor would be best for a conveyor belt?

[JesseK]

I hate to put it like this, but the answer is: it depends.

For our conveyor, we're using only 1 window motor. With our roller, it gets the balls through 40" of conveyor in 5 seconds. This is acceptable to us, as the motor has more than enough torque and the speed is 'fast enough'. We also are trying to conserve weight, so more motors are impractical right now. (Our drive train + pneumatics + electronics board came in at 65 lbs )

[vivek16]

Originally Posted by cgredalertcc

I'm not sure exactly what it is you are using, but if it is hollow they make barbed connectors that the tubing slides onto either end of. They are extremely strong: it took another mentor and I to pull it apart. If it is polycord they sell the welding kit, but that is $300, so it isn't terribly cost effective.

Best of luck

Actually, you can just melt the ends with a butane lighter or a heat gun and stick them together in a piece of angle to bond them. You can trim off the excess urethane around the bond afterwards. We have 8 of these belts on our robot, each with 10 percent stretch or greater and I don't think we'll have them fail any time soon. A tip is to cut the belting at 45 degree angles to have a greater surface area on your bond.

-Vivek