Well a hate to give away all my secrets, but here goes ,buy two locking washers and put one on the drive shaft then install the pulley and the second washer and the nut.

I think Batman is saying that he used a washer to move the front pulley out to allow the belt to ride the center of both pulleys.  

Norm, the lines are good enough, my belt is 21 years old and looks like new!  

Dave is correct (as usual ).  I think what often gets overlooked is the fact that the inside of the pulley rides on a bunch of rubber.  There is some play at the rear pulley.  The rear wheel rides on 2 bearings and a solid axle.  There shouldn't be any lateral movement.  That's why I'm not 100% sold on trying to center the belt at the expense of wheel alignment.  

I'm not saying that the lines are perfect or that you can't fudge things a little bit.  But to take that to any extreme would be foolish in my opinion.  If you have to do anything drastic to get your belt to run quiet, you have bigger issues and you might want to look at solutions like the ones Batman and Dave mentioned.

Has anyone every run a laser down the outside of the rear pulley to the outside of the front pulley?  

Did cheat a little on my bike. I put a 1/16" washer inside the swing arm to take up the space left by Suzuki. That reduced the offset by that amount, not much but some.

I found that to get the pulleys perfect, belt centered, the marks were way off. :'( The belt rides on the outside of the rear pulley with the marks lined up- A la Suzuki. No belt noise.

Incidentally, I have my belt a little tighter than recommended here. I can get 90* twist but it takes a LOT of effort. Eyeballing the belt set up as recommended looked very slack to me.
What happens if a person uses the Suzuki gage? It is very tight.

norm92de wrote on 05/22/17 at 12:49:02:



Loosen the adjusters a bit and let the axle move forward....then snug up the axle and see you you can wiggle the rear pulley when grasping the front and rear - this will tell you if the pulley hub bearing is bad and is allowing too much movement.  This is what likely is making your belt move to the outside of the pulley - especially if your belt is too tight.

I believe a belt that is a bit loose is better than one that is a bit too tight.  (Just like underwear)

Does the sewing machine sound I get when decelerating have any thing to do with belt tension or alignment?

Kenny G  

Dave,
Just checked my bike. Belt loose, axle tight. Maybe a sixteenth of an inch play fore and aft when grasping the pulley. I would think that is reasonable for a rubber mounted pulley. The belt tension must be pretty high at 60 mph especially up hill or when accelerating.

I'm going to try centering the belt to see how far off the swing arm marks are.