where in USA to buy drive chain/gears?

well nuts,,,,,,,

there's car timing chain kits like this for only $40 a set. :P

only problem is the chain might be a bit too short, so i may need to buy another chain and lengthen one somehow. if the stuff comes apart, that is.... ?

Bulk chain, connecting links and sprockets are available in many sizes from many sources. Online you have McMaster, MSC, Surpluscenter and many others, retail you have Tractor Supply and similar.

(...)

Try Stock Drive Products:

No connection other than as a very happy customer.

--Winston

they don't have it at all, they only have roller and ladder chain

Neither McMaster, MSC or Surpluscenter sell any chain or gears for silent belt-link chain.

It looks like this:

It doesn't go on "sprockets", it goes on specially-made gearwheels.

Okay, I have found one (USA) place that does sell them:

I don't know if they're eager to do retail or not though. And they don't offer "online" sales, but a location is pretty close.

I may just buy the $50 timing gears & extra belt and see what I can do with them first.... I can't imagine that the individual chain & gears would cost me less than that.

That indeed looks hard to find. I just surfed Mcmastercarr nothing there. Do you have super high torque needs? Otherwise, take a look at heavy duty XL timing belt and pulleys

I see in your other replies that you require a completely different animal than SDP can supply.

For applications below say 1/20 HP, the SDP chain drives work great.

--Winston

From looking at the site, I believe the market they are attacking is the OEM one. They're not doing onesies unless they're engineering samples. If you're doing that sort of work, give their engineering folks a call.

How much torque are we talking here? A lot of what would formerly be done with chains and sprockets has transferred to cogged timing-type belts. Even Harleys use them, so it's not just for fractional horse- power. Any reasonably-sized city should have one or more distributors of same.

A lot of the problems with chains are caused by wear, with wear you get stretch, with stretch you need some method of taking up slack. Don't have that to that extent with cogged belts. That's kind of what those Ramsey chains look like, metal cogged belts.

Just another thought.

Stan

It's not even the strongest there is. Looking at the car timing chain sets, pretty much all the heavy-duty ones are precision double roller chain.

The "silent" inverted-tooth belts are only recommended for OEM or mild performance use, but they ARE the /quietest/, though.

Try Cogswell Cogs, Inc. They have everything. Just ask George Jetson, the Spacely Sprockets engineer.

Most industrial motion suppliers carry these, so look for companies like

in your area.

-- If only he'd wash his neck, I'd wring it. -- John Sparrow

I bought a timing chain kit & extra chain, as I knew the timing chain it came with wouldn't be long enough for what I want.

Long story short:

1) Breaking and re-joining this stuff isn't really possible without the equipment designed for it.

2) Chain that is the same size can have the leaves woven different. So if you need ten feet and already have five feet on hand, you still need to buy another ten feet (& a joining pin for the ten feet) since there's no guarantee that whatever you by will link up properly with what you already have. ....The two different chains I bought cannot be joined, as the weave pattern of the links is different.

:/

And motorcycle chain and sprockets won't work because???

Don't do what I did, buy a sprocket that needed 13 splines on the shaft, unless you have good indexing and milling equipment.

Bicycle sprockets are easier to mount: jsw

Motorcycle chain would work, but car and motorcycle transmissions with chains inside them don't use motorcycle chain. Silent chain is much stronger, quieter and wears a lot longer.

I have a small mill/drill and a rotary table with B&S plates. No shaper though.... I guess it would be possible to use the quill plunge and RT as a "manual" shaper, at least for the ~2.5 inches of the quill's travel.

What I do /not/ have is a suitable attachment for shaping with the mill.... (scribbles down another project...)

I will probably just use some double-strand roller chain & sprockets from McMaster-Carr. The places that sell silent chain all seem to be commercial-sales-only, or too busy to answer an email.

I don't have a shaper either. I milled the spline grooves with this shop made cutter:

other end of the bit is a close enough copy of a tooth in the sprocket bore that I could jam the shaft into the hardened sprocket with a hydraulic press. I cut the grooves slightly deep to avoid an interference fit where it didn't help, the shaft OD was easier to fit snugly.

Are you going to enclose this drive and run it in oil? Roller chains work fine exposed with only occasional lube. BTW my old Honda 350 used a roller chain to drive the camshaft.

jsw

Before I get too far into this, do you realize you are putting 5 HP into a

Out of curiosity, what is this chain going to day and how much power does it have to transmit?

Cheers,

John D. Slocomb (jdslocombatgmail)

13 splines- sounds like my motorcycle. The first few years of the honda XR600R had a 6-spline sprocket, later years had a 13.

Dave

I am building an engine; this is a step-down drive for an output shaft.

RPMs would be 2500 tops, pull on the chain might be maybe 100 lbs at the most.

The final drive will use bicycle chain, so I want to use something much stronger than that inside the engine's case.