Gah! Belts!

Just getting ready for a long weekend of carving and one of my Y-axis belts breaks. Barely a month into owning it. Fortunately, I found a 5 meter length at Amazon that I can l pick up tomorrow.

Looks like I’ll be ordering the stuff I need for the 9mm upgrade sooner than I expected…

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yikes! going to be upgrading mine soon too.
anything in particular cause it or…?

I was a little dirty? Maybe I had it too tight? It was 5lbs at 1” according to the fish scale. Looks like my left side is fraying on the edges also. Grrr…

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4 lbs.

Make sure everything is as aligned as it can be.

Hi @AndyF that is not an expected behavior for the belts. Please contact Inventables Customer Success and review this with them. I believe we need to send that belt back to the supplier for analysis. That failure mode is outside the expected range of operation.

@Zach_Kaplan Will do.

If you look at the framing, do you see any shiny spots or any areas that appear to be worn?

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I do not. It all looks the same (after I dusted, lol).

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Do you have a link to the upgrades?

I had the exact same thing happen to mine last night. Just got it in January and it very little run time on it. This was the first big project I have done.
Was like 4 hours.

Wow! Second belt break! This time the X-Axis belt. I haven’t even had it together and running for three months. I’m at 4.5lbs @ 1". I wasn’t planning the 9mm upgrade yet, but this is getting frustrating. Was just almost finished with something I’ve been prepping and cutting for two days. Ugh…

4.5 on stock belts could be the culprit? I tension my 9mm belts at 4lbs@1".

Phil recommended 4.65 so I stuck around that. My Y-axis stiffening mod has made it easy to cut at higher speed than stock but I’m not sure the belts can handle it. I may either need to upgrade to 9mm or slow down. That would suck though, because I’m finally running at a speed that I can get chips of MDF instead of sawdust and my cuts are so clean…

If it’s your second in 3 months, you’d save more just doing the upgrade than waiting on it lol.

Yeah, definitely pushing it too hard for the belts…

If the sign in the background is what was being carved => a lot of back’n’forth movement on a small area of the belts. The wear will be high and a belt upgrade (9mm) will help spread the load.