Fan Drive

This was supposed to be a simple thing

to make and install but it to proved to be a challenge and left us with another compromise.

My first error was that I cut the shaft about an inch too short

while in a hurry to get to some company that arrived early and wasn't paying enough attention and cut it on the wrong mark, bummer huh.  We had to wait a week to get another shaft from RotorWay which they sent out pronto.

On our ship the unit is not aligned with the pulleys on the clutch,

but after sending pics to RotorWay, Tom Smith says it will work fine but I'm still not comfortable with it thinking that it's got to really put some wear and tear on the drive belts causing an early death to them.

It's major work to replace these belts, some builders/owners leave a new belt in their clutch pully for just such an instance so they don't have to pull the entire clutch assembly out to replace the upper fan drive belt.  Sounds like a plan to me but after looking at the clutch drive unit I'm thinking that someone went to a lot of effort to balancing this unit and having an extra belt lashed to it would have to throw it out of balance causing alot more damage then the work it would take to disassemble the unit so we opted to leave this spare belt out and go the long way around.

We feel the mounts for the fan drive shaft are welded in wrong and improperly sized to allow for having a straight shaft alignment.

The upper shaft bearing mount needs to be set so the shaft can go further in toward the clutch

or the lower mount needs to be longer outwardly to allow the lower bearing to come out from the ship more, resulting in a perfectly aligned shaft.  If you do this it will take welding on new brackets which will be compromising the factory welds and frame and it will take different sized belts. The top belt may be able to be used but the bottom would have to be larger.

 

We couldn't put the clutch assembly any more to the right because
if we did the upper belt to the fan drive wouldn't be long enough to reach the pulley and allow us to put the bolts in the holes.  Perhaps this belt needs to be longer but
Rotorway had nothing to offer in the way of an explanation other then they have seen them worse and it would work just fine.

Either way it would be a compromise so
we went with the ability to be able to install a belts without a porta power and stressing everything.

To much pressure here may add to frame cracks in the after thought of it all.

Another thing is be sure to paint the shaft or it will rust, guess how we know that lol.

This is a tensioner tool I purchased one your from a vender while I was at Homer's Fly In.

Don't buy one becasue it's totaly useless because it won't fit between the fan drive pullys.

END