- Joined
- Dec 3, 2022
- Messages
- 9
My son has a couple of 2” x 32” belt grinders in his knife sharpening van. These are kind of hard to find machines kind of cheap units the motors failed early but the size works well in his tiny van. He bought better VFD motors for them. The drive pulley has a flat surface the adjustment idler is the only curved pulley. Out of the box they walked belts under load pretty bad too. Tried many things.
first solution was creating a curved surface on the drive pulley with multiple wraps of electrical tape. Pretty solid fix for a machine thats cheap and hard to find.
after a few months use he decided he ran that grinder at a fairly low speed but putting heavy loads on it lugged it a bit. Things like garden farm tools etc. I decided to make a drive pulley that was half the diameter on my lathe. I threw an extra twist on it I knurled the new pulley. belt crawl is now non existent. I ask myself if it’s the extra grip the belt has or a tighter circumference created by the smaller pulley. He doesn’t think this has shortened belt life either.
these drive pulleys are pretty easy to make if you know anyone with a lathe, in case others are having issues here without a cure. It’s also easy enough to do some math and figure out how much belt speed dropping a given size will change. you can make the pulley what ever size that fits your needs I think we should have made them even less than half there original size for his needs. there also easy enough to change if you need more belt speed for something.
first solution was creating a curved surface on the drive pulley with multiple wraps of electrical tape. Pretty solid fix for a machine thats cheap and hard to find.
after a few months use he decided he ran that grinder at a fairly low speed but putting heavy loads on it lugged it a bit. Things like garden farm tools etc. I decided to make a drive pulley that was half the diameter on my lathe. I threw an extra twist on it I knurled the new pulley. belt crawl is now non existent. I ask myself if it’s the extra grip the belt has or a tighter circumference created by the smaller pulley. He doesn’t think this has shortened belt life either.
these drive pulleys are pretty easy to make if you know anyone with a lathe, in case others are having issues here without a cure. It’s also easy enough to do some math and figure out how much belt speed dropping a given size will change. you can make the pulley what ever size that fits your needs I think we should have made them even less than half there original size for his needs. there also easy enough to change if you need more belt speed for something.