Union Jubilee Clutch.

[Retired]

Hi,

Thanks for your good wishes and encouragement David. As you say David it does come as a surprise to see the slipping belt clutch only recently patented but I suppose as it's been around so long that everyone using it assumed it had already been patented?

I too like the big old cast iron machinery Lawrence; I enjoyed owning both my Dominion and Colchester lathes; I never liked the Transwave converter though right from the start; it was a 7.5HP model costing me something like £325 second and over 12 years ago so it wasn't cheap. It's machine starting performance was dismal in fact I paid to have it checked out sending it back to Transwave who assured me it was OK? If you was happy with yours Lawrence then it suited what you wanted to do with it but for my use I was highly disappointed; at times I thought the Transwave was going to jump from its wall mounting when I applied a decent cut on the Colchester; the Transwave objected very loudly which was most annoying. I don't want to call Transwave converters names but for me no thank you.

Like you Lawrence I too know very little about variable drive pulleys; I know they exist but I've never had hands on with one. I agree with you in that if the two pulley cheeks could be separated enough to break grip on the belt then it follows the pulley would no longer drive? The problem with this though is I believe it would end up becoming complicated in sorting out some kind of linkage and installing it to force the two cheeks apart after all these cheeks are spring loaded; it's possible I could do it if I put in enough time and effort but I now know of an easier method?

What a good rule of thumb Lawrence when you say if a problem is un-resolved in an an hour then it's going to take ages; funny this; all my projects so far fall into the latter category; I start off well then the projects bite me.

I've mentioned a number of times that I hope to keep this clutch project as simple as possible even saying I would like a simpler solution to the one shown in the link in post #44. Since I last posted I've been browsing the web looking for the "finger" idea to see if anyone else had tried this but without success. I then remembered the video I added in post #26 where the guy was using a slipping "V" belt clutch on his engineering lathe. A simple pull of a short lever and this guy could start/stop the lathe whilst leaving the motor running but how was this achieved because I was lucky in the first place to spot this?

I settled down and ran the video a number of times but this time really taking notice; operating the lever was done so quickly that I kept missing what I was looking for but I then ran the video and kept stopping it; at first I still could not spot what I was looking for but after repeated attempts the solution was finally staring at me; this guy has actually put into practice exactly what I had in my head; a pair of metal fingers arranged to deflect the belt. This could not be better; this confirms that a very simple solution is available; obviously I'm not unique in thinking about this but it saved me experimenting without knowing my idea would work. I had taken it one step further in my head because I was concerned about belt wear if using bare steel fingers so I planned on using a pair of bearings?

I also considered spring loading the motor mount set to lift the motor in default position making it "Off". I'm still undecided about this but I need to play around to find the optimum position for the fingers and once I can tilt the motor to break the drive then I'm home and dry with only other bits to tweak?

It took a lot of concentration to obtain the picture below but how brilliant it is in showing the two metal fingers; hindsight is wonderful and I could have saved myself lots of time had I thought about spending time to study the video closely?

I feel depressed with this weather and I don't feel like getting off my backside today but this will pass. My new clutch cable has just arrived so hopefully if my idea works as planed this cable will save me rigging up complicated linkages to tilt the motor?

I captured the video image using the digital camera but as I browse "You Tube" a lot can anyone advise me how to download allowing me to save these videos to disc as I would like to keep many of them for future reference. I don't want to infringe any copyright so please ignore if this is an issue?

Kind regards, Col.