I got a flat belt question

I bought a Harvey hammer mill that I want to operate with my jd h. What length and size belt roughly should I need. Never used anything like this. How much tension do I need on the belt?

5 OR 6 wide and you want the tractor about 25ft away from the grinder. Two cycl tractors arent the best for belt driven stuff not realy smooth under power on the belt so you need the mill fastened down good to have a good tight belt.

pic of the hammer mill would be ideal. not familiar with a harvey mill. you should measure the pulley width on it, as its most likely at least 6".if that mill has any size to it i dont think you have enough tractor there.the longer the belt the better. just line up the tractor to the mill install belt and backup. i am sure with that little tractor it will take all it has just to tighten the belt. i used to make chop for the cows with a grain crusher used 100'endless belt and w6 mccormick. didnt take long to pail into the crusher 40-50 bushels off barley of the 1/2 ton.

Width should be 80% or more of the width of the driven pulley, but not more than 100%. Tension should be only enough to prevent slippage. Alignment is important, and should be within an inch or two. Parallelism is also important. The belt will stay put with some pulley skew, but not much. If the belt is too tight it will have a short life, as will the bearings being driven and the tractor drive as well. On a JD, keep the engine at load speed, do not run it at idle under load. The cylinder firing pulsations can cause issues with vibration and fast is smoother. Good luck and keep people and materials away from the belt. Jim.
A solid article.

Hi, hope you can install the hammer mill so the belt is out of the prevailing wind or run with a crossed belt. We ran a hammer mill with a 100 ft 7 inch endless belt with a JD 420, IH SC, 300U, B414, 454.
The hammer mill was installed on the east side of the barn in the granary but if the wind was blowing from the north, it was impossible to keep the belt on pulley of the JD 420. On the 300U, B414 and the 454 we could flip the drive pulley and run a crossed belt in the wind.

JimB

It looks like this. If I need to I got a f20 also that may work better.

Not sure of the width belt I use but its got to be at least six, maybe eight inches wide. Not quite as wide as the pulley on the mill. Tension will depend on several things such as how fast you are trying to put the grain through. Obviously increasing the load on the mill will call for better traction (more tension). Alignment makes a big difference to traction too. A longer belt is easier to keep tight I find. You can watch mine at work here.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CzzxmTclK8g

Some where by the hammer mill pulley there should be an arrow indicating direction of rotation. The other thing that I forgot to mention when using old tractors on the belt, the tractor should be on the level as the transmission gears and bearings relied on gears to splash the lube around in the transmission.

JimB

Remember the belt pulley on an H JD turns backwards of any others.

I have to run the belt crossed to get the right rotation on the hammer mill.

One thing not mentioned by the others is to hang a chain from the tractor, to the ground, to Ground it and prevent static electricity from building up and shocking the crap out of you..!!!

Ron..

You do need to keep the mill up to speed so the fan can suck the feed out of the mill. Our Deere #10 had 3600 RPM cast into the side by the pulley. Our 51 A Deere would run it up to speed running the tractor wide open but the SC Case couldn't spin it fast enough. Boy do I remember the days of having to level the feed wagon while dad fed the grain into the mill. I looked like the Pillsbury Dough Boy by the time we were done. Jim

(quoted from post at 20:15:00 03/19/13)
One thing not mentioned by the others is to hang a chain from the tractor, to the ground, to Ground it and prevent static electricity from building up and shocking the crap out of you..!!!

Ron..

Click to expand...

That is interesting. I have never used a grounding chain and never seen or felt any indication of static electricity . And I am normally very sensitive to that. Maybe something to do with having a fibre pulley on my tractors?

The one thing mentioned about static electricity. Another thing to remember is that grain dust is highly explosive too! I worked at a grain mill years ago and we had to watch safety videos on this.
A longer belt will have a lot of tension on the pulleys just due to the weight of the belt. It doesn't have to be stretched tight as one may think.

tension will pretty much be provided by the weight of the belt itself.

(assuming you go with a reasonably long belt)

You just need enough tension to keep the belt well off the ground and you should be good to go. Don't over do it, more isn't always better.

I'll try to figure out how long the one is that we use - I want to say 25 feet pulley to pulley - but I'll check later.

For width - not super critical for a hammer mill. They tend to clog if you overload them anyways, so slippage isn't a huge concern.

Anything slightly less than the width of the smallest pulley - but more than half.

Try to get the pulleys in line with eachother the best you can, but don't kill yourself. The pulleys have a rounded surface (side to side) that helps keep the belts centered when running, even if you're off a little.

Hammer mills sound like jet engines once they get spinning. You'll love it once you fire it up.

Kind of surprising, the belt looks like it's going slow, but the sound of those hammers flying around will keep you on your toes, being a constant reminder to keep your hands well away from the feed hole.

I don't know what you plan to grind, but unless you want to be blowing it out of your nose for the next three days - get a dust mask!

If it's not obvious - the "hammers" should be reversible - if the leading edge corners of yours are rounded, it'll work better if you flip them and get sharp edges.

I looked, but all I can find is one picture of me grinding corn. Not a very good shot of the mill or the setup. Might have more elsewhere - if I find any I'll post.

Very similar mill - they're all pretty much the same design. If you look closely at the bottom you can see the width of the belt we use.

here's an old flat belt on my sawmill it's 9" and transmits 74 hp to the mill

Ours was a David Bradley 10" mill and required a 6" belt and it has to be an endless type in a rubber type of belt. The leather or canvas belts will just split wide open on that small mill pulley and the splicing on a belt cannot make that short of a turn and will ruin the lacing. Your John Deere H will only run a 6" mill lightly loaded at the max and with that revercing pully you would have to run a double twist belt, the Farmall a single twist belt but I do not know if that pully was fast enough to run a mill. Corn shreaders did not require as fast a speed. A Farmall H or John Deere B would run that 10" mill OK but you could not overload it either. And we NEVER had to ground a tractor on anything, hammer mill, buzz saw, corn shreader because of static eletricity and all we had were rubber tires. And on that belt Dad found out what would happen in the first 5 minutes of trying to use that canvas belt from the corn shreader, it is still laying in the barn 50 years later. and as long as you have working distance between tractor and mill, about 15 feet it wil work but a slightly longer belt will work better but if you go too long you can never get the belt pulled up tight enough that it will stay on, that is one problem your Deere would have and that is not enough power to tighten the belt and also weight as that tractor is not heavy enough a tight belt would want to slide the tractor. The mounted buzz saw on the Deere worked ok because you only used a belt of 5" wide and just about 3' longer than the frame of the tractor to the belt pully and the saws had a built in belt tightener. On the rubber endless hammer mill belt they were measured on total outside length so a belt that would span a 20' distance was 40' plus the distance of half way around each pully so that would have been about 41' finall length and they were sold as a certain length but with a 3' less lenght due to the overlaping way of making them endless so a 41' endless belt would only give you 38' so to get the lenght you needed for the pullys to be 20' apart you had to order a 44' belt. We always had to drive stakes in the ground and chain our mill to them to hold it in place as it was only used once in a while, perhaps once in 2 months and 99% of the time it was just grinding hay for to mix in the hog feed. Would fill enough berlap bags to last for ceveral loads of hog feed and when would go to the mill for the feed (did not have a sheller or mixer to complete the feed job) would take the bags of ground hay along with the bags of oats to be mixed in after the mill shelled the ear corn we haulled in and mix it all together.

I was wandering why you see belts crossed up, makes sense now. You all think the h is bigger enough. I got a jd b, m, f20, la, ao, also that I can use if any of them may work better.

If that is the late JD B then that would be the best followed by the AO. Early JD B would still be better than the H Deere

We powered a small mill with a Fordson Dexta, grinding corn. Had the mill bolted down the barn floor. I remember we really had to jockey the Dexta around to get it lined up right so the belt wouldn't fly off. Too long ago to remember what the belt size or length was.

Is the belt speed on the H fast enough? You may have to get a different tractor.