So @Daniel_Noree printed GT2 belts for his Makerbot. And then successfully used them. Have we gone too far? Are we playing god? Can we continue to wield this power ethically? Are we monsters? When are these machines going to take over earth?
Originally shared by Daniel Norée
Playing around with Taulman3D Nylon 645…
https://www.youmagine.com/designs/83t-gt2-timing-belt-used-on-makerbot-replicator
God, is that you?
@ThantiK or just plain stupid… 
OK, i really have to try making one of these :-), but I need a 20T, i think it is too small…
@Daniel_Noree , I’m actually thinking that it wouldn’t be too bad of an idea to use some of the ‘flex’ resin, to drop kevlar line into a print like this, and seriously print belts. Manufactured belts would probably be a lot cheaper, but in a pinch or for prototyping…
Cool idea, but nylon does cold flow, and is quite hygroscopic, so it won’t be very dimensionality stable as a belt. The Kevlar belts would help the stretching in the hoop but the teeth would eventually deform on shear. I totally dig pushing the envelope though, and I’m site out would work fine for a decent amount of time
I’m all for anything that increases the self-replication capacity of the Reprap 
This would also have the potential to introduce something that we’ve been able to avoid for a long time: heritable error. If you print a belt on a machine with a stretched belt, the pitch of the teeth on the printed belt will have the same error, and a belt printed on a machine built with that belt will inherit the error again. Of course, this could be compensated-for in software, but is going back to empirically-adjusted steps/mm really worth it? What’s worse, if the error is unequal in the X and Y axes of the machine printing the belt, the error will be inconsistent over the length of the belt, creating error that can’t be compensated-for with a simple multiplier.