The toothed belt that rotates the dome is about 3/8" too short. GIven variations in assembly I don't really see how it could come out to an integral number of "teeth" anyway. So when the dome rotates over this spot where the beginning and end don't quite touch, the sprocket wheel comes out of the track and spins without moving. One solution for this would be to have the software not cross over this point but go around the other way, as you do with a rotator to keep the cords from getting tangled. I don't see a way to do that in the software. I've bolted the toothed belt to the dome using the technique given elsewhere here because I didn't trust the two-sided Gorilla tape. The only other solution I can think of is to cut maybe 6" of the toothed belt shift it a little so that it splits the missing 3/8" between each end of the 6" piece (3/16" each). I would put screws through the dome to secure this piece so the tape wouldn't have to bear the load. Any other ideas????
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Toothed Belt for Dome Rotation 3/8" too short
Toothed Belt for Dome Rotation 3/8" too short
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NexDome Observatories Inc.
Port Coquitlam BC Canada
Sales@nexdome.com
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Mine is indeed closer to the seam and I actually had to push hard on it to make it fit as I ended up having the opposite problem :)
I had the same problem and found I payed out the belt at the bottom of the dome. Once I moved the belt up closer to the seam, this essentially reduces the diameter of the dome, my belt fit correctly. I only wish Babak would annotate the installation document to show proper placement.
I have all the above problems with my new installation. About one tooth short and the tape sticks to the dome but does not hold the belt. I will try putting the Scotch brand over the current Gorilla. If I end up having to screw in the belt, can you advise how far apart you placed the screws?
I'll probably lay it on the dome without the tape to see how much gap there is. The based on the gap will see if I need one or 2 layers of tape.
I can verify that the Scotch Extreme Mount is much stronger than the Gorilla tape. I added a layer of Scotch on top of the Gorilla and that did the trick. The two ends of the toothed belt came right together. Problem solved.
Thanks.
I don't do FakeBook, I won't even go there using friends account to check anything.
Do you have a link to the 3M Scotch Mount "Extreme" tape ? I haven't decided yet if I'm going to add screw or not.
"Interesting" problem.
I'm yet to assemble mine (within the next 2 weeks or so as the structure for it is being built), but I assume there are mechanical "imperfections" on the panels and trying to get them to conform to a smaller inner circle (aka pushing the panels edge as far as possible toward each other) would take care of this (that's about 1cm so it probably can be reduce a lot by pushing panels closer).
As for the software solution , there is no option to set a point to "avoid" (or a hard stop needing to send the dome the other way around).