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09-25-2015, 06:55 AM
Excuse the title. I don't mean to imply I'm a master of anything. It's a quote from Wild, Wild, West and I used it to be funny. 
As some of you already know, I spend a lot of time building a lot of various things, including other robots for competition. I thought I'd share the occasional mechanical success story. This stuff always makes me think of other cool things I could do on my droids.
We needed some idler pulleys for one of our robots so we could flip which side of the drive train the belt was on. They also needed to fit the bearings we had on hand and be a specific diameter to keep the proper belt tension. None of these criteria were met by any of the commercially available pulleys we could find, so I designed and 3D printed these:
![[Image: pulleys.jpg]](http://rebeldroids.net/gallery/albums/userpics/10002/pulleys.jpg)
they printed in halves, then bolted together with #8 32 bolts, trapping the bearings inside. We've got 'em on the bot and so far they seem to be working pretty well.
I'll let you know how they hold up.
As some of you already know, I spend a lot of time building a lot of various things, including other robots for competition. I thought I'd share the occasional mechanical success story. This stuff always makes me think of other cool things I could do on my droids.
We needed some idler pulleys for one of our robots so we could flip which side of the drive train the belt was on. They also needed to fit the bearings we had on hand and be a specific diameter to keep the proper belt tension. None of these criteria were met by any of the commercially available pulleys we could find, so I designed and 3D printed these:
they printed in halves, then bolted together with #8 32 bolts, trapping the bearings inside. We've got 'em on the bot and so far they seem to be working pretty well.
I'll let you know how they hold up.