Keeping Belts and Pulleys Clean
 

I'm having trouble with foam and carpet fibers building up on my belts and pulleys. Particularly the front belt in my Xray T3. Are there any tips for easily cleaning this up (rather than picking at it with an Xacto knife). Also looking for tips for keeping it clean. Would some kind of Teflon spray work??

Thanks.

i use a toothbrush to clean the belts and pulleys and works well. as for prepping the belts i just spray them with WD40.

An old painter's brush does wonders. It's important to inspect the pullies and belts every so often and doesn't take but 5 minutes.

No one soaks the belts in WD40 - just run them as they were designed.

I had this same problem with my old TC5 but never found any preventative measures. I just checked them every so often...

tooth picks are a good disposable tool for cleaning belt pulleys :):tire:

This is definitely beyond a painter's brush work. It takes some effort to get it out with an Xacto. It is compacted foam in between the teeth on the pulleys. As said above I too had the same problem with my TC5. Would love to find a solution that could help keep the foam from sticking.

maintain regularity. No! WD-40 cuz it attracts dirt. Keep them dry and check the tension of belt. Good tension will squeeze the crud from between the belt cogs, diff and mid gear. Xray has a good belt tensioner.

I just use a good set of tweezers. I look at the the pulley and belt then turn it, you can see the belt rise a bit if there is a clump of carpet in there. The tweezers work just as good if not better than an exacto. It takes a few min but can get kind of annoying. I dont think there is any real way to prevent this from happening unless you drive a shaft driven car.

Good luck

I just clean my x-ray pulleys with Xacto like you described..... It is a pain that's for sure... I run rubber asphalt and in get rubber build up in the pulleys

Would an air compressor work?? It works wonders offroad:nod:

There are lots of teflon sprays/lubs out there, or wax ones like odonell's o'lube. i would think atleast the telfon ones would help keep dirt from sticking and it might even make you belts free up some in the process. i doubt you can prevent it much. the whole point of a pulley and belt is for the teeth of the belt to mash them selves into the pully and if anything is inbetween the belt and pulley then it gets mashed into one or the other.

i still think belts should be redesigned to look like the edges of printer paper from back in the dot matrix days. you know, the hole and spike setup. just run straight kevlar, no rubber.

That seems like a neat idea. The only problem I see if the tooling required to do that (are there any existing belts in other applications like that??) and the belts would likely need to be wider. It would almost certainly solve the problem though.

i dont know if you have packed stuff in plastic bags, i mean like car parts, but there is a device that seals and cuts the end of plastic bags that looks like a papers slicer (you know the big hinged arm with a blade), but it uses hot wire instead of a knife. ok the point im getting at is, if you looked at one of these plastic seal/cutters, there is a fiber stip on one side that covers the wire. this is what i imagine the belt would look like. i will find a picture.

a plastic bag sealer. this is what im taking about:

http://www.packagingcenterusa.com/Im...ter%20copy.jpg

the little fiber strip on the bottom element. thats with some holes in it and a full circular belt is what i imagine what the belt would look like.

hear is a picture of the strip by itself and it already has teflon too!

http://www.abtec.com/sealers/sealerparts.jpg