Homemade V-belt pulleys

I'm back at it again making more pulleys than I need. Still using only hand tools to build the patterns, but now I can machine them on the lathe for a smooth finish! I decided to put some pictures up since they look interesting (and I get to plug my newest booklet! Weeeee!) --Aug./17/2002

Here is the drag half of a mold where you can see two pulley cavities. One is for a 5-4-3-2 cone pulley and the other is a 6" single grove pulley. Notice the spot on the right were the single groove pulley's hub will form! The core prints are also visible.

Here is another mold half for two cone pulleys. The cores are already in place. Baked sand cores are a good thing since I sure as heck don't want to drill the pulley's bore hole.

Here is a bulk core box that I made from aluminum. There are a few cores of different sizes in here ready to be removed and put in a mold.

This right here is what it's about. Two nicely cast cone pulleys. The one on the left is a 5-4-3-2 and the smaller one is a 4-33/8-25/8-2 which is the size specified for the Gingery shaper!

These came out really well and are usable as soon as I cut off the gate, file the V-grooves to smoothen them out some and clean out the bore. If I used that petro-bond sand they'd require almost no finishing.

Here is a cheap and easy "disk lathe" that I nailed together to spin the pulleys so that I can rapidy file the V-grooves smooth as they rotate. This is really all the "machining" neccesary but for looks I "faced-off" the outsides as shown in part 3 of this series.

The disk lathe is mentioned in my pulley making booklet. Yes that was a blatent and shamless promotion of the booklet. Oops, there's another :-)

Here another one of the pulleys for the shaper. I don't have any plans to build the shaper I just thought it be nice to test my pulley making methods with an obscure size combination.

I was just casting pulleys and dumping them in a pile. It's more fun than pouring ingots...

Wanna see part 3; machining pulleys?