Fan belt

[Mknorr]

Hello,
I have done a bit of searching on this but haven’t had any luck finding anything so far.
All the scale engines I’ve seen use an O ring as the fan belt. I would like to find/make a V belt instead. Does anyone have the recipe for making the rubber that belts are made from?
Cheers,
Manfred

 

[ninefinger]

No idea on formulations for making your own belt, but have you considered modifying an existing belt to suit? For example, timing belts are available in a huge array of sizes - a 6mm wide belt can be as small as 120mm pitch length (~circumference). This could be used as is on flat pulleys, toothed pulleys or it could be reshaped (cut) to a V-profile for use with V groove pulleys - many applications actually use notched V-belts and that is what the final product would look like.
I guess the scale of your application would dictate if this is a feasible idea but check out http://shop.sdp-si.com for what is available - in my example above I was looking at 5mm pitch HTD belt.

Good luck and do share your project.

Mike

 

[Cogsy]

I also have no idea about materials to formulate one, but Mike's post above made me think of the miniature timing belts found in things like scrap printers. May be able to cut and join one of those to the size you want. As Mike says, it'll look very scale and even if the joint isn't perfect it won't see a lot of load on a model.

 

[Charles Lamont]

MXL timing belt is 0.080 (2mm) pitch and is available as small as 1/8" wide.

Proprietary belting is not just rubber, it has cord reinforcement. If you want a V-section belt you could try a J-section Poly-V. You could slit this down to one rib wide, but I am not sure it would be stable. A standard exists for H-section Poly-V, but nobody supplies stock belt.

There are loads of on-line suppliers who will sell you one belt of almost any length and a couple of pulleys. I have used Bearingboys and BeltingOnline in the UK. Just get Googling and find out for yourself.