Waaijenberg Canta LX - New Management DRIVE BELTS 25/10/23

Speak about retaining their value.

11 year old, 200cc engine, maybe, and still selling for pretty much £7000.00

Yeah, life and weather is pretty much stopping play at the moment.


I have had more belt progress though.

Turns out that the "right" belt for Dutch market Cantas is the wrong one for the three UK ones. The bigger engine means the pulleys are further apart, so the belt needs to be longer. Something that's quite obvious once you actually start properly looking at it. Doh.


This means a couple of things. Firstly, the non-appearing belts from the Dutch supplier wouldn't have fitted anyway (they have finally confirmed that they have my money, and have cancelled the sale, but have applied a credit to my account rather than a refund. I am now attempting to get said refund rather than having credit at a shop with nothing I want to buy in it). Secondly, the two belts I got from the supplier in the US don't fit either.


There's no adjustment on these. Pulley centres are meant to be fixed, and belt length is critical.


This is where it gets complicated. For the system we have, stock pulley centres are, from memory*, 10" and 13". Typically, on here we have 12", and no means of adjusting it.

I am pretty sure that the reason for this is that there simply isn't room to move the bigger engine any further than it currently sits from the gearbox input without hitting either structure or bodywork. This means the factory probably made the decision to compromise and use a non-standard belt. Guess what? The belt that I need is a Comet 704146... the same size as was originally fitted. Closer examination of that old belt shows that it's significantly worn; particularly on its width, which explains why it seemed so slack.

So. I now have two new belts in my posession that are too small, that I am hoping I can recoup the bulk of their purchase cost by selling them via the Canta facebook page, and about 70 euros credit at a Dutch parts place that I am trying to get refunded to my account.

Helpfully though, Belt Palace in Warsaw, Indiana, have come up trumps again with the right size belts, that they shipped out to me earlier this week. Obviously, I have had to pay freight and will no doubt get stung for customs fees, but at least there appears to be light at the end of the belt tunnel at last.

I need to survey the door lock barrel setup so I can make a decision about ignition locks. Ideally, I would like the doors and ignition all on one key if I can, so buying a lock set for a Berlingo/Partner looks to be the way to go, provided the door barrels look comparable.

More as it happens.

So you have the correct belt en-route.

Frankenhealey may have had answers too.

But in the mean time I guess, like me, the rain is a pest.

Yeah. I suspect that they're pretty hard on the belts anyway, given that the belt itself is effectively the friction surface that takes up the drive, but I would think that the brief period of being ragged senseless around a field after its prolonged layup probably took a belt that was just about hanging in there and turned it to scrap in a few hours. The old belt still bears its Comet branding and numbers, and given the car's low mileage, it's probably the original from when the car was new 23 years ago. Driving on its edges, as you say, means it sits in the vee of the pulleys, so given that this one is worn to about 2/3 of its original thickness, that's why it is now so slack.

In use, the belt is supposed to be just slack enough to allow the drive pulley to spin freely then, as the revs rise and the top pulley closes up, it grabs the belt just above tickover and off you go. Because the original is now so slack, it doesn't grab the belt until the engine is revving pretty hard, which is why takeup is so hard and snatchy.

The Dutch report belt life of up to 20,000km, but that's in a country where hill starts are going to be much less of an issue than the UK, particularly where I live. It's a system that's probably way better suited to go-karts and golf buggies than a road car in the UK, but we will just have to see how well it stands up once it's back on the road. Hopefully, driven sympathetically, I will see a reasonable life in terms of time as I am only needing to do 1000 miles a year on my commute, so if I can get 2-3 years out of a £50 belt I'll be happy enough. I think Zelandeth has a similar system on his Invacar, so I would anticipate similar belt life once everything has polished itself up again.

Head to head at the Weekender in '24?

Yeah, there’s no “clutch” beyond slipping the belt.

Speaking of which… a parcel from America arrived Friday.



Gives a better idea of just how badly worn the original one is.

There's a technical term in the trade for such a belt. It's SHAAAAAGGGED

Got this delivered the other day. 



Which is an ignition switch for a Peugeot 205. I picked this out from the many similar Valeo alternatives simply because it had the longest leads. Plugs are different, but the functions are the same. I should be able to swap the plugs onto it from the original switch. 

👍

Wasn't craigk interested, too?