In House Test Report - Hartzell Propeller, Inc.

Objective

Find a surface conditioning belt that has a good cut and good finish with very little chunking and stretching when used on Hartzell’s robotic cell.   

 

Summary

ARC’s recommendation of materials for this application are the X-Flex Course and X-Flex Medium.

These two products cut just the same if not better than 3M’s Coarse PD-A (the current product used at Hartzell).  These products also had a better finish than that of the 3M PD-A belt.

When testing the stretch these two belts were similar to 3M’s PD-A belt.

Neither of the X-Flex belts lost grain structure during grinding.  This “chunking” which occurred in some of the other test materials, leads to stretching.

 

Products Used

3M Regular Crs Belt 3M PD-A Crs Belt Low Stretch Fine, Med, and Crs X-Flex Med and Crs

½” x 20½” ½” x 20½” ½” x 20½” ½” x 20½”

 

Results

Three separate tests were performed on seven different surface conditioning belts.
• Tensile test on a sample piece ½” wide by 100mm (4 inches) long.
• Grind and scratch tests that were performed off-hand at 9600 RPM using an electric “dynafile” type tool.

The grind test was a twelve minute test on 6061 grade aluminum where the Roughness Average (Ra) and Max Depth (Ry) values were taken every four minutes.  The values were taken on the flat of the aluminum.
• The first two minutes of the test were performed on the slack of the belt on the edge of the aluminum.
• The second two minutes were performed on the contact wheel on the flat of the aluminum.

These two steps were alternated until the twelve minutes were fully completed.

 

Conclusions

Our recommendations based on these results are to use ARC’s Coarse or Medium X-Flex product.