pic: Team 3647 West Coast Drive

[Chris is me]

Originally Posted by AdamHeard

I've got my doubts about the two separate plates being able to adequately support the shaft. It would probably work, but it's going to put unnecessary excess load on the bearings and possibly deflect more.

We take a weight penalty by doing this, but this is why we just drill through a 1/8" extrusion and mount our bearings in a stationary manner. Precision milling multiple solid parts like the Poofs do and making them concentric is harder for us with our resources, so maybe it would be easier to do that and add floating tensioners or idlers.

To make up for the inefficiency of not necessarily being able to get a perfect chain tension, we switched to belts. This line of thought ultimately led to how we decided to make our "west coast" (east coast?) drive.