Finally got around to recording a video on my preferred method for welding polycord (urethane) belts. I find it significantly easier to get consistent, strong welds this way compared to a heat gun. Hopefully someone finds it useful.
Oh thanks a lot this is perfect. My team will probably use hotplates in this upcoming season if required.
While making belts in 2017 we found that doing this and using a jig to hold the belts together so they wouldn’t be off from each worked the best. This was with flatbelting so it was a bit easier considering all we needed was to support both belts on only two sides. I’d imagine that you could make something quite simple for roundbelting also that would prevent the need to have to line the two ends up by hand.
There are tons of cool examples polycord jigs out there, personally I’ve never found them to be necessary. It’s easy enough to cut and re-weld if I’m unhappy with the alignment. Anyway the goal of this video is to hopefully make polycord welding less intimidating for those who haven’t done it before. I wanted to show it could be done reliably with a minimal amount of equipment.
Yeah as you say with round belt it is not actually that necessary. For those wanting to do some type of flat belt the actual melting of the belt is the same process but having some type of jig can be very helpful due to the difficulty of holding two pieces of flatbelting together. For us this jig was two pieces of aluminum clamped to the table to create a right angle to push both belts on then all we had to do was move them together and hold them there.