Question for those that use Link Belts

[Earl]

I put a new (well known belt manufacturer's) A33 belt on my mill. It made the mill shake like a wet dog. I ended up putting the old, frayed belt back on. I have seen several good comments and great reviews of various link belts and decided that perhaps I should give one a try. I have searched without success to find out if Link belts are bi-directional. Just looking at them it seems that they are one direction only. Does anyone here have experience using a link belt in a bi-directional environment?

 

[pacifica]

I had the link belt with metal t nut studs on a harrison boxford lathe and it worked fine bi-directional. -But Fenner drives say link belts are for only one direction.

 

[woodchucker]

I have for a short time... no problem, but they say don't...
if you look at the belt you can understand why they say that.

 

[pdentrem]

Been running a Fenner on my table saw for about 15 years. The old belt shook the 3 hp unit, the Fenner tamed that down and I get nice smooth cuts. Also have put them on different equipment at work, ie mills, lathes, etc.
Had one failure. I had installed one on the auger drive on my old Toro 8x24 snowblower. I sold the blower 6 years ago and recently my neighbor bought it. We did a full service on it and the belt was missing. We could see bits of the belt melted onto the drive pulley. Likely the previous owner was pushing the blower.
Pierre

 

[Earl]

Been running a Fenner on my table saw for about 15 years. The old belt shook the 3 hp unit, the Fenner tamed that down and I get nice smooth cuts. Also have put them on different equipment at work, ie mills, lathes, etc.
Had one failure. I had installed one on the auger drive on my old Toro 8x24 snowblower. I sold the blower 6 years ago and recently my neighbor bought it. We did a full service on it and the belt was missing. We could see bits of the belt melted onto the drive pulley. Likely the previous owner was pushing the blower.
Pierre

were you running the belt in both directions ?

 

[pdentrem]

There is one machine at work with the belt could run reversed. A Jet lathe BDB1340A, been 5 years so far. No sign of excess wear.
Pierre

 

[john.oliver35]

I've run my Boxford lathe and Rockwell will with link-belts for 5ish years, both with reversing motors, and no problems. It certainly won't hurt to run it for a while you contemplate other solutions!

 

[Buffalo21]

I’ve run Fenner belts on all of my machines,, mills, lathes, dp, etc, for yrs in both directions, without any issue. They are all I run

 

[Earl]

There is one machine at work with the belt could run reversed. A Jet lathe BDB1340A, been 5 years so far. No sign of excess wear.
Pierre

Thank you. I will give one a try on my mill. My concern is that when I go from Hi to Low, the spindle reverses so I have to reverse the motor to keep the spindle going in the right direction.

 

[Old96er]

I replaced the belts on both the mill and the lathe with Fenner powertwist off of ebay. I had a noticeable reduction in vibration compared to brand new belts, especially on the mill. I do run them in reverse on the lathe sometimes, no issue so far.