This conveyor belt was my first attempt into making something to move material in a laser cutter. Note this is only an attempt because the motor was not powerful enough to move it because the belt friction was too high. I made the internal frame too thin to fit a bigger motor, so would have to redesign from the ground up. The other problem was the material tended to ‘skate’ across the belt because the friction between the belt, and the relatively light 3mm plywood was too low to be useful.

I used toothpicks as axles to make the belt flexible. There are 2 layers of 3mm Baltic plywood that are the slats of the conveyor belt. Those sandwich a part that has an S shape to weave between the 2 layers with an axle hole at the end. I used a Nema 17 motor inside of it as the drive motor, but found that even the longest one (most torque) I could find was not powerful enough to move it successfully. The problem is due to the giant amount of friction because the belt has a very large surface area dragging on the frame of the support. That means there is a friction force acting over an area that is around 1 1/2 square feet. I think to fix this design and make it work: I would have to embed tiny bearings that are just above the top surface of the support section, so the belt will ride on those and greatly reduce the static friction so the motor wouldn’t be working as hard and should be able to move it.

The main axles holding and driving the belt are made with some 6mm ply rings on nuts that were locked onto the axle made of all-thread. I think these ones were double nutted with thread lock if I remember correctly. The core structure was also 6mm plywood for the vertical parts and I skinned the top and bottom with 3mm ply.

Then to protect the wood under the laser cutter I used aluminum tape to cover the belt. In my testing I found it does help protect the wood, but after many hours of cutting, the wood resin that deposited onto the metal provided a material for the laser to heat up and did eventually cause it to melt away the aluminum and the laser could eventually burn it’s way through. So in conclusion, using aluminum tape does provide a temporary solution but is ultimately consumable, but I think a permanent solution would be to make the belt out of metal completely if it will be in the laser cutting path. The other solution that I am currently working on is to have the material holding section only at the far sides holding the material suspended in the air; you can’t cut what’s not there.

I also had an idea to use this same mechanism with 3/4” plywood to make a 6 foot tall vertical conveyor. Then building T-nuts into the belt that I could use to mount on rock climbing hand holds. Running it at a slow speed with a mattress / foam underneath and it could be an infinite climbing wall.