Measure twice. Buy once.

The belt on the shaper had been in decline since I got the shaper. The decline had been speeding up and the motor compartment was starting to fill up with bits of shredded rubber. Since I'm going to be having the shaper running for five or six hours this weekend, I took the belt off and measured it for replacement. According to the tape rule, it was a B49. Allowing for the motor mounting bracket being a bit on the low side, I reckoned that anything between a B48 and B49 would do the job.

I phoned up the nice people at Wyko and the admitted that they had five B48-1/2 belts in stock. Great.

I picked up a belt at lunchtime and brought it home after work. I checked the alignment of the pulleys on the assumption that misalignment might have been causing the deterioration. The alignment seemed ok.

I fitted the belt. It looked to be riding very high on the pulleys, strange... I got out the measuring stick and checked the pulleys.

The pulleys are A section. The reason that the belt that came on the shaper was falling apart is that it was the wrong belt. Closer examination of the original belt showed that the damage had been caused by the pulley flanges cutting into the flanks of the belt. At least the belt that I've got now runs much more smoothly than the original and will last until I can get the correct A48 belt next week.

The moral is probably:- Don't assume that things are correctly set up when you buy them, even if they seem to have been used that way for some time before you got them.

Mark Rand RTFM

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Mark Rand
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