Here are a couple of pictures to show progress so far. I've mounted the whole thing on a new board and because the mdf was slightly bowed, have screwed it down. On the table is a jig that I made up to hold the Bond-a-Band belting in alignment while it was heated and then pushed together while it cooled. On the end of the soldering iron is a little gizmo that I made up to heat the belt at the correct temperature, 200 degrees, so that it could be joined. In actual fact and despite the fact that I filled the end of the little tube with solder, there seemed to be poor heat transfer so, I wound up the unit to 350 to compensate for any loses. The first time that I cut and joined worked very well but, I made the belt too short and had to let a piece in and have another go, good thing that I didn't throw away the off cuts. The suppliers suggest allowing 6% for stretch but this was far too much and the motor wouldn't turn. Back to Mr Thomas's book and he suggests 3.5% and a very good way to achieve this which was simply to move the head of the unit, simple when you think about it. I tried that and it worked fine until one of the jockey pulleys seized up. These have/had brass bearings but I bored out the pulleys and fitted some ballrace bearings that I had 'in store'. They are not sealed for life but I think that they will be fine in this case. When I tried this time, the pulleys ran fine but the belt snapped at a join so, back into the jig for another go. The jig took me a good day to make but I'm now finding that it was time well spent
. The supplier states that full strength is achieved in five days so, that's how long I'm going to leave it this time before I have another test run. The little vice on the table I picked up at a local second hand tool shop. I cleaned it up, machined the base flat, painted it and made a new fixed jaw, the reason escaping me for the minute. I wanted to paint it the same colour as the Pillartool but Halfords didn't have the same colour in stock. Well, it was over twenty five years ago when I bought the original paint so, can't blame them really.
Jon