Replacement y axis belts

[sagoth72 (William Hamblin)]

I was wondering how to go about replacing y-axis belts. Are their 3rd party options or only what came with the 3 xxl pro?

These belts have been at the heart of all my issues for months now. It seems they are either too tight or too loose but rarely have I found the sweet spot between. When I have it only seems to stay correctly tensioned for one job. When I come back the next time back to the same issues.

The z and x move smoothly but anything involving the y you can tell the machine seems to have some degree of vibration almost as if it is fighting itself to some degree. It can cause very noticeable errors in cutting or simply look like someone with a shaky hand did the cutting.

One suggestion for future belt iterations, is it possible to have white markings suggesting the correct range for the belts to be positioned in the clips to eliminate guessing.

[Julien]

Hi @sagoth72,

Have you been in touch with support@carbide3d.com ? Having a troubleshooting session with someone there is probably the most expedient way to understand what is wrong with your belt setup.

If the Y axis specifically is giving you trouble, it may be because the machine is not quite squared correctly or it could be uneven tension between the left and right belts.

If the belt tension only lasts for one job there may be something wrong in the way the belt clips are installed.

I assume you have already gone back to the belt tensioning instructions in the assembly manual, so if there is nothing obviously wrong about the way you installed them, talking with support is probably best.

[WillAdams (William Adams (Carbide 3D))]

There is no

@sagoth72

3 xxl pro

Since the Shapeoko 2, Gates GT2 profile 2mm pitch have been used.

6mm wide up through the SO3 Launch, summer 2016 they became 9mm wide.

With the launch of the Pro and SO4 belt width became 15mm wide.

These are available in various widths from various specialty vendors, BB Man, SDP/SI, Texas Belting, &c.

See:

Measuring belt tension, squaring and calibration

A post about belt tension, how to measure it, what effect it has and why you need to manage belt tension in order to usefully calibrate and square the machine. As usual, no criticism of the machine here, in fact some quite clever design choices seem to have been made. The question of drive belt tension has been bugging me. How much you should have, how to check it and how it affects machine performance. I failed to find any quantitative data to use, so I went and started measuring; and found t…

Please write in to support@carbide3d.com and we will do our best to assist (let us know you’ve seen the above link if it doesn’t help).

[sagoth72 (William Hamblin)]

Being out of square was originally an issue and I reassembled to get it in square. That actually helped for a while. I would roll the gantry forward with the power off and both ends didn’t touch when I had it as far forward as it would roll. You could easily see it was out of square. That doesn’t seem to be the problem now. I’m just wondering if with all the experimenting the belts are somehow stretched. I’m going to undo the belts on both ends and slide them down an inch or two and see if using a fresh part of the belt to wrap through the clip helps.