Delta Lathe 46-715 Belt Replacement

[Greg Just]

I have the Delta Lathe 46-715 and need to replace the belt. It has not broken yet, but needs to be replaced. I have searched SMC thinking there was a link to an article or a web link on this specific lathe. I found other articles on other Reeves Drives but they were not much help. I'm trying to be a little proactive here. Any assistence is appreciated. Thanks!

[Bob Hampton]

greg
might give a link belt a try ..I installed one on my nephews old craftsman lathe and worked out great ..even took away most of the vibration that he was having...got it from woodcraft but there are other sources for them

bob

[Alan Tolchinsky]

Not sure about the link belt. I thought I heard they were not suitable for reeves drives.

[Gordon Seto]

Not sure about the link belt. I thought I heard they were not suitable for reeves drives.
That was what I have heard as well. Reeves drive relies on the belt to move up and down in the pairs of varying width pulleys.

[Greg Just]

I figured out how to get the belt off. All I had to do was to remove the back cover, the three screws holding the hand wheel on, remove the hand wheel and slipped the belt off. Now I'm going to the auto parts store to get a matching belt.

Thanks for your help.

[Bill Boehme]

Make sure that you get the right belt. It is not normally stocked in auto parts stores. What you want is a wrapped belt as opposed to a raw edge belt. Raw edges tend to have too much gripping friction on their sidewalls for a Reeves drive which means that the belt does not do a good enough job of keeping constant tension on the belt -- that is why a raw edged belt will flutter all over the place. However, the last replacement from Delta was a raw edged belt, so go figure. Regarding link belts, you can use one in a pinch, but I would not recommend them as a permanent solution. The reason is that the spindle speed on a Reeves type drive, unlike a convention belt drive, is not only a function of the pulley diameters, but also of the belt length. Since belt tension is constantly changing in a Reeves drive and the length of a link belt changes with tension, speed regulation will not be very good. To clarify my last statement, the average or long term speed will be pretty good, but the instantaneous speed during a revolution of the spindle will not be constant. The effect at the spindle end is that it will be like introducing low frequency vibration into the drive and I think that this could be problematic for trying to get a smooth surface on a thin walled turning. I have had that model lathe for about five years and concluded that components in the drive train wear out rather quickly. The belts don't do well if you turn large diameter turnings and the die-cast zinc pulleys are too soft and tend to wear out frequently under heavy duty use. My opinion about the lathe is that it was designed primarily for spindle turnings like table legs by woodworkers who mainly did flat woodworking things like furniture making. For that scenario, it works very well, but it is not quite up to being a full-time bowl lathe for everyday use.

I have completely disassembled the headstock on my lathe more times than I like to think about. My last overhaul which is still going on is to get rid of the Reeves drive and replace it with an electronic variable speed drive and micro-V belt.