TOURNAMENT THIS WEEKEND!! Is there a better way to rig our chain? We have two powered tank sprockets and a smaller one serving as a guide on both of our lift stacks, seen here . This sort of lift set up slips and isn’t very good at keeping the entire loop tight. We also have our ongoing lean issue, which we’ve tried to solve with the makeshift braces you see in the images. Suggestions or comments are greatly appreciated!
If you have a competition tomorrow, the easiest and quickest way to prevent the chain skipping would be to add guides.
Use a screw with plastic spacers, and position it on a hole really near the sprocket so that it is almost touching the chain, and holding it against the sprocket so that it can’t skip.
Also I would suggest for your next build to not lift so much steel. That is making it skip a lot more.
Getting the right tension on chain and keeping the loop tight is a challenge. If you have a lot of chain to use, then I would suggest making few separate whole chain links of the same length for the lift. Then putting on all of the chain links on and see which one fits best. Also, I suggest using chain that is pretty used. By using the used chain then it is most likely already stretched out and won’t stretch any more. I did that on my drive last year and it worked pretty well. Since it is on a lift though it could be different.
Now about that lean, I think I mentioned that we made makeshift braces out of chassis rail that seemed to be pretty heavy to begin with. Could there be a better way to fix this issue? Not that we’re only using on derlin slide on each linear slide.