How To Check for Proper Sawmill Drive Belt Tension

I'm Robert with Cooks Saw manufacturing and we're here at our HD 3238 and I want to show you a little bit about tension on our drive belt.

We do have bigger sawmills and we have smaller sawmills, but our belt tension system will be the same across all of our sawmills. The only difference is if you have our MP32 mill you will have a single band belt while our hydraulic sawmills do have the double band belt.

To engage the blade we're using this handle here and it has a idler pulley and that puts tension on the belt. It’s used to engage the Blade and disengage the engage the blade; very, very simple. Can we put a clutch on our sawmill? Yes, we can put a clutch on it. Will a clutch give you problems? Yes, a clutch will give you problems. On a sawmill we want to be very simple, and we want you to be able to make field repairs while you're sawing and we don't want to have you to have downtime waiting to get a new clutch. So, we have gone with the mechanical system and we've been doing that for years and we really like it.

Now checking tension on our belt we've got a small little belt tension gauge. You can buy this from our store online and we'll put a link in the description below. With the sawmill not running we want to first engage our belt by pulling down on our tension handle. On a side note, if you're having problems with it slipping while it’s running and engaged, I’m going to go ahead and say it's too loose. If it's flopping around and vibrating bad it is also too loose. But we've got a little gauge here and we'll put it center as we can on the belt between the shaft and drive pulley and then we push down on the gauge to check the tension of our belt until we hear it click. We want to be at 100 to 120lbs of pressure on our belt.

Another way of doing that is going back to our tension handle. When I'm pulling this handle down, I want to feel about 20lbs of pressure. This is maybe a little a little bit harder to gauge that's why you can get the tool.

If you find that your belt is too loose, we need to make an adjustment. The rod going through our handle has two collars on it that can be loosened and the rod can then be adjusted to either loosen or tighten the belt when engaged. If you need more information or help to make that adjustment, we do have a how-to video on this that we can send you a link to watch.

Thank y'all for watching our video we do appreciate it if you would like, subscribe, and comment on anything else that you want to see videos for. We are still taking requests and we're trying to get through them all so give us some time on that.

Again, thanks for watching we appreciate it.