does anyone know where i can get a set of aluminum pulleys for my shoptask, shoptask does not sell them and I want to increase the speed , shoptask said the pulley are the weak point in upping the speed, :confused: thanks to all, TJ

Just some questions to help understand.

Are you talking mill or lathe head?

What are the current pulley sizes?
What are the shaft sizes?

How much faster do you want to go?
Are you concerned with bearing heat at higher rpm?
(running it for a few minutes is different from many hours)

What size cutters are you planning on using?

Pres

just the mill pulleys, about 6 to 8 k
the main pully has some kind of broched center the the drive shaft rides in,
I am just looking for the pulley the rest I can do myself, Thanks, TJ

personaly anything over 3k on the shoptask will rattle every bolt loose. i got it up to 5k playing arround and took me longer tighting everything back up then it was worth. just my 2 cents

Rainmans229
did you find a aluminum pulley set, if so where please, thanks, TJ

no aluminum pully set known. you do have a lathe. you can make a set.

the main pulley has some kind of metric broached center (I have no ideahow to)

the main head pully has the key way broachs and a bearing. you need keyway cutters( broach) not to sure never done it. never even thought of making my own pullys till now. go with a 3500 rpm motor and remove the intermedian pully. the extra pully is it's biggest issue and the stock motor is 1700 rpm

the main pulley on the mill is tha main issue, I had a junk HF 3 in one before my shoptaks and i use the spear main pulley (cut down) as a shaft lock whan changing mills, it has the same type of center, most of your shaking was most likely caused by the cast pulleys, shoptask said
"The bearings would take 4000 rpm ok, but the cast iron pulley is the limiting factor- you may need to change that to aluminum."

Even if you had a broach to cut the spline I don't think the aluminum would hold up.
If you have a spare pulley with the right spline you could make a hub from it for a new aluminum pulley. The pulley has to be a press fit on the top bearing so the whole job is not an easy task but doable.
Jerry

does anyone know where i can get a set of aluminum pulleys for my shoptask, shoptask does not sell them and I want to increase the speed , shoptask said the pulley are the weak point in upping the speed, :confused: thanks to all, TJ

Did you ever find any aluminum pulleys for your conversion? Now that I have my DC drive conversion done, I am looking at all those unused sheaves and cast iron weight spinning around. JT has a couple of old pulleys with chipped edges he said he would give me, so I am thinking of just machining away all the unnecessary material. Another poster said you can knock down the rotating weight of each one by about 9#. That would be a big advantage if you want to run at a higher speed.

Try this website for the pulley. They ship to the U.S. Try machining your mill pulley down like the one in my picture They are grossly out of balance from the factory

http://stores.ebay.co.uk/RDGTOOLS-ON-LINE_LUBRICATION-BEARINGS-PULLEYS_W0QQcolZ4QQdirZ1QQfsubZ11QQftidZ2QQtZkm

[QUOTE=digitalmdj;573652]Try this website for the pulley. They ship to the U.S. They are grossly out of balance from the factory

QUOTE]

I don't see any reason to order something from England that is out of balance and still has to be machined. Plus they don't offer the splined pulley for the mill. My machine runs super smooth as is with the DC motors, so I think I will just machine down the original pulleys to reduce the rotating weight unless someone has found a source for aluminum ones with the splined center.

The pulleys are to light to make a difference. And I don't think he has money to spend on that setup. It would cost him more than his machine is worth. Also that isn't what he asked so why bring it up. Yes the pulleys need to be machined and broached but you will have to do that with any pulley you buy. It sounds like you trying to sell dc motors instead of answer his question. Which is where to buy a aluminum pulley. He should be more worried about the imbalance of the one supplied by Shoptask. The mill pulley is cast and they cant machine it very well because of the design and its not balanced from the factory. Your main problem is the fact you have allot of unbalanced mass rotating on your machine and because it isn't balanced your machine vibrates at high RPMs. The only way to fix the problem is to reduce the amount of rotating weight or to balance everything on your machine. Both ways could be expensive.

Your main problem is the fact you have allot of unbalanced mass rotating on your machine and because it isn't balanced your machine vibrates at high RPMs.

Where did you get that idea? If you read my post, you will see that I said my pulleys have no vibration problems at all. They run smooth as silk, I only want to reduce the weight so I can safely increase the RPM. I suggest you read things more carefully before posting about some one else's machine.

<snip>

The pulleys are to light to make a difference. And I don't think he has money to spend on that setup. It would cost him more than his machine is worth. Also that isn't what he asked so why bring it up. Yes the pulleys need to be machined and broached but you will have to do that with any pulley you buy.

</snip>


Why is that? I run both steel and alu versions at several thousand RPM's - directly from the shipping box. I strongly believe you are wrong in this issue.

I am right that is the reason we had to turn down my mill pulley to get it fully round. You can see from this picture that enough material was not removed from this mill pulley on one side at the factory. These pulleys are cast Iron and show no balancing holes or grind marks. Not one of them . So how can you say they are balanced form the factory. I had to static balance my pulley at work to get it close and in no way was my mill pulley close. Also a aluminum pulley is so light it might be out of balance a few grams . But a cast Iron pulley is heavy and could be out of balance a few ounces. Which one would cause the most vibration.

A picture is worth a thousand words.

does anyone know where i can get a set of aluminum pulleys for my shoptask, shoptask does not sell them and I want to increase the speed , shoptask said the pulley are the weak point in upping the speed, :confused: thanks to all, TJ

Hi folks,
This is the original question- the thread seems to be going off in all directions, one guy posted a link to a pulley source and then said modifying them gets them out of balance. Others claim the factory pulleys are fine, just too heavy. I am thinking of either the DC drive kit from shopmaster or doing a VFD kit of my own. Either way, I expect to be running higher rpms than the stock machine, so some positive input to the pulley thing would be helpful. My machine is very smooth right out of the box, so I am not worried about any balance issues, but according to Shopmaster, the cast iron pulleys are too heavy in stock form to run much over 3000rpm.

Hi folks,
This is the original question- the thread seems to be going off in all directions, one guy posted a link to a pulley source and then said modifying them gets them out of balance. Others claim the factory pulleys are fine, just too heavy. I am thinking of either the DC drive kit from shopmaster or doing a VFD kit of my own. Either way, I expect to be running higher rpms than the stock machine, so some positive input to the pulley thing would be helpful. My machine is very smooth right out of the box, so I am not worried about any balance issues, but according to Shopmaster, the cast iron pulleys are too heavy in stock form to run much over 3000rpm.

Mr. Clark,
I am right in the middle of this process right now, so following are my opinions;

1. Forget about the aluminum pulleys because they will not gain you any real help on this machine. The max you would ever want to turn these spindles is about 6000 rpm. The mill pulley would need the splines, and you would want the spline portion to be steel, requiring some sort of press in sleeve. On the lathe, you could probably bore out an aluminum pulley and broach a keyway without much trouble, but the stock lathe pulley can be reduced to only a couple of pounds without much effort.

Lathe-
The stock lathe pulley weighs in at 7 1/2# and because of the deep dish design you can cut away all but the smallest sheave ( 4 1/8" diameter) with a hacksaw or bandsaw. Then you can set it up and mill away the rough areas. My calculations say the resulting piece should weigh about 2 1/2#. On my DC motor I am using a 2" pulley, giving me about 2-1 reduction from the 6000 rpm motor, so my max lathe spindle rpm is about 3000.

Mill-
The mill pulley weighs in at 9# stock and I will retain the 3rd sheave which is 5 3/8" diameter. My mill motor pulley is 2 1/2" giving me about 3000 rpm on the mill as well. Using the 3rd sheave on the mill pulley allows you to cut away the maximum material, which should reduce the weight to about 3#. If you want higher speeds you can change the motor pulley to 3" diameter. The mill pulley can be chucked up in the lathe and cut away.
JT at shopmaster offerred to send me a couple of old pulleys, but I will save the postage and cut down my originals. He also assured me he has spares in case I foul something up.

Jd here is a picture of my VFD drives. This setup can be moved from one machine to another because I used twist lock plugs. Its only good up to 1 1/2 horse power motor but it will plug in to a 30 amp 110 plug. The shop task requires a 30 amp plug to run properly from the factory so if someone says different they don't know what they are talking about. The stock motors pull over 25 amps at a full load so they need a 30 amp circuit also. The flexible part is it does not have to be used exclusively for your shoptask. If you have a bridgemill mill it is 1 1/2 hp also and can be up and running in minutes by just pluging it into the motor. The drives output 220 3 phase so a 3 phase motor is required.