Belt Driven router for Aluminum milling?

[Jed Lawrie]

First post in this section. A buddy of mine was talking about building a router for milling 1/2" aluminum and acrylics. We got to talking about drive systems. The idea of a belt driven system came up. I couldn't find any major companies making a belt driven system on a 4'x4' platform.

Any thoughts on how that might hold up compared to a typical rack and pinion system? Obviously it would have to be some heavy duty belts. 1" wide or so

[William Adams]

Belt drives are the province of hobby systems --- there are a number of them which use belts, but which will cut aluminum --- 4' is probably pushing it for belts though --- the current Shapeoko 3 using 9mm GT2 belts tops out at 33" of cutting area for the XXL. The next option up is 3M GT2 for maximum stiffness at the expense of precision (+325% modulus @15mm wide, 4X-5X backlash) (as noted on the Shapeoko wiki).

See

- http://www.sdp-si.com/D265/HTML/D265T003.html
- http://www.bbman.com/assets/files/pd...Properties.pdf

(ob. discl. long-term volunteer and currently part-time paid tech support for Carbide 3D the company which sells the Shapeoko 3)

[Gary Campbell]

Jed...
In most cases belts that long will stretch with the force required for cutting aluminum. Wood too for that matter. That's why you see so few of them anymore.