I seem to recall that you have had several different chassis? Do you think this problem has existed with all of them?
The belt squeal had been an issue to varying degrees since I got the third chassis. It's a bit of a hybrid chassis, it's got the welded in braces at the front but has the earlier solid mounting for the bevel box. They possibly took a standard later model chassis and welded in the older style bracket for the front end of the box; the bracket's certainly not quite as far forward as it should be for easy fitting and I suspect that the output shaft and the swing arm pivots are slightly further away from co-axial than the earlier chassis so a bit more variation in belt tension with suspension travel and with all the other variations I don't think that the swing arm was ever as close to the sprocket as it should be even if it was adjusted as far over as it could reasonably go.
The machine gun banging was only since I took out the swing arm to clean and repaint it, that's when I discovered the lack of a dust seal and that the unprotected bearing was utterly shot so changed the bearings too. What I did was set up the bearings like I would any other taper rollers; take them up tight then back off slightly and lock the adjusters when what they really need in this application is to take them up tight, then tighter and tighter again until the problem goes away. Luckily mechanical sympathy was something I had to try to learn rather than being born with, so was able to get there in the end!
Hopefully I now have the two issues either solved or at least under control. Wonder what will go next?
