We know that belts love to slip on worn pulleys, but what causes pulleys to wear in the first place?
For most pulley drive systems, belt slippage is the culprit. You can check out our post on causes of belt slippage here.
To clarify, pulleys wear when belts are allowed to slide through rather than gripping the belt grooves. Any condition that allows the soft belt rubber to slip rather than grip will cause the belt surface to act as an abrasive, slowly abrading away the much harder metal pulley grooves.
When pulleys operate in dusty, dirty conditions, the dust and dirt will act like sand on a hard floor, causing slippage and accelerating abrasion. To make matters worse, a lot of dust around agricultural and mining machines contains hard, abrasive particles such as silica.
Eliminate belt slippage, and you’ve eliminated the primary cause of pulley wear. Check out our post on reducing belt slippage here.
In addition to reducing belt slippage, you can also consider replacing the pulley using a harder base metal or heat treating the pulley to increase its hardness, or we can apply an extremely hard skin of Vulcan Grip®, our company’s patented, nano-crystalline pulley coating.
[…] If your belts are slipping too much, you won’t only be replacing the belts- you’ll end up having to replace your pulleys, too, because slipping belts cause pulley wear. […]
[…] excessive amounts of belt slip. Belt slip, in turn, causes pulleys to wear faster- creating a vicious cycle of pulley wear, glazing belts, and heat- lots of […]