I think that the information about the Harley sprockets has been incorrect.
I have a sprocket here in my office with the inside flange popped off due to picking up a rock. I'm just getting a new inner ring cut out in our water jet and will TIG it back on for him to get back on the road.
This sprocket has over 40k miles on it and it belongs to a friend of mine. It's not unusual for a belt and sprocket to last 50k to 60k miles when ridden normally.
This is a current touring 1" wide sprocket that has been used on all touring bikes since '08 with the cush drive.
This is a cast aluminium sprocket, not steel, chromed or anodized when new. You can see some wear from the belt, but even though it's a Kevlar belt, only the rubber ever touches the aluminium. If the Kevlar was touching the sprocket the belt would be worn out or defective.
This shows the cush drive lugs that mate up to the rear wheel. The normal touring 16"x5" rear wheel now have 180's installed.
Just one last item to show you guys. We have an Omax water jet that can take a 5'x10' sheet of just about anything. We cut our Lexan guarding with the radius corners and all the 1/4" retaining holes; cuts like butter.
The picture below is the off fall from our last run of cutting timing sprockets for one of our new servo machines. These sprockets are cut from plate aluminium and are 1" thick.
The pitch on these is 8mm Polychain and I believe yours as well as the Harleys are 14mm pitch. We've cut both and we can cut any diameter or tooth number we want once it goes through our Solidworks for a proper layout.
These particular sprocket run the Gates Polychain belts 24/7/365 and we've not replaced one in 8 years since we've been making our own sprockets.
Just a bit of background on water jet cutting. On thicker material like the sprocket the jet will tend to lag behind like a cutting torch does. We have the Tilt-A-Head option that allows our cutting jet to tilt up to 9 degrees in any direction while cutting.
By running test parts we can tilt the head so the diameter is exactly the same on the top as the bottom after cutting. We do 2" thick aluminium plates and we blow holes for 1/4" taps all the way through. At first they were funnel shaped, but with the tilt-a-head we can keep the bore diameter the same all the way through the 2" plate.
We can cut colored glass too. We have a customer that draws out what she wants the stained glass to look like in AutoCAD and then gives us a .dxf file for the Omax. We cut all the very intricate pieces for her and they are smooth on the edge.
Sorry for rambling again about a side topic.
Have a great day dudes and dudettes...
