Pulleys and belts

Hi all,

I'm new to the forum. I'mt thinking about construct my own 3d printer. I'm searching for some information and i come across with the pulleys and belts. Tried to see what are the differences, read some posts in reprap's wikipedia but i' not able to find an answer to my questions.

The question is, what are the differences between the pulleys (gt2, 2gt, mxl, htd, fht, xl)? Which one is better for a DIY project?

Grateful

That was a small old research of mine, I don't remember the specifics, but in general, most other belts are timing belts, meant to go in one direction to time things in sync.
GT2 and a few others are linear motion belts meant to remove backlash in multi-directional movement.
In all my findings, GT2 is the best belt for the purpose, there are varying opinions [like timing belts having negligible backlash, therefor GT2 is pointless, etc] but those that put any type above another almost always point to GT2.
The difference between all of the belts is simply the geometry of the belt.

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 06/11/2014 05:29PM by MrDoctorDIV.

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Realizer- One who realizes dreams by making them a reality either by possibility or by completion. Also creating or renewing hopes of dreams.
"keep in mind, even the best printer can not print with the best filament if the user is the problem." -Ohmarinus

I think the reason why there are different opinions is, some of the belt types are pretty much identical. AFAIK, GT2 and HTD are hard to distinguish at all, for example.

The only important measures are zero backlash and a not too big tooth size to allow reasonably small pulleys. For printed pulleys, printer resolution is a limiting factor here.

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Generation 7 Electronics	Teacup Firmware	RepRap DIY

Quote
Traumflug
I think the reason why there are different opinions is, some of the belt types are pretty much identical. AFAIK, GT2 and HTD are hard to distinguish at all, for example.

I think many of them are close to being identical performing for our purposes. If you haven't seen/read it, take a look at this paper which goes into details on many of the profiles. The profiles may look pretty close, but there are definite performance improvements HTD and the better performing GT2 especially for high speed, high torque, or high power applications. And none of those 3 really apply for 3D printing.