[SEL] Belt Dressing

[Greg Hass]

Sure enjoyed looking at the pictures.  Brought back a lot of memories.  We 
used to own a grinder like the one shown, however ours was PTO-driven and 
it went from the PTO shaft to the grinder with 5 V-belts.  Before that we 
had belt-driven grinder that we ran for several years with a Farmall Super 
C.  We would grind 100 bags a week with that grinder.

Without being critical, I noticed in the pictures that the belt seemed 
awfully loose.  When we had our grinder we had the wooden platform staked 
to the ground with 4 two-feet long stakes.  Besides that we had a 10-foot 
plank which we would anchor against the frame of the grinder near the drive 
pulley.  The end of the plank lying on the ground would be held by a 3-foot 
stake driven in the ground.  We would then tighten the tractor into the 
belt until it was drum tight.  Before this we would hire my uncles to fill 
our silo and the blower was driven with a belt.  The same thing here - the 
blower was staked to the ground and the brace plank staked.  However, their 
drive-belt was 100 feet long and just backing the tractor up enough to lift 
that long belt off the ground was more than enough tension on the pulleys 
to keep it from slipping.

Quite a few years ago we had a sawmill in that the guy ran with a John 
Deere R.  He had a belt about the same length as your grinder and ran the 
belt fairly loose so that he could take it off fairly easily at night 
without moving the tractor.  However, the thing that made it work was that 
3-ft. from the sawmill pulley and on top of the belt he had a 50 lb. idler 
pulley that would weight the belt down and act as an automatic tightener.

I am just suggesting that one possible cause may be that the belt is too 
loose, althought belt dressing may also be  factor.  I'm not going that far 
back in history because we always seemed to be behind the times.  While 
other people were using modern grinder/mixers and high capacity PTO-driven 
blowers, we were still in the belt era.

Greg Hass