Belt Gear Chain Onewheel Go kart tire geared hub drive General

This will be a research and dev thread for any drive systems designed for Go kart tires or tracks, maybe.

Honorary mentions


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The belted one wheel experiment

I looked a little bit into directly driving a go kart hub with a BN M1-AT gearbox. That might be worth a try if you like high speeds. Obviously packaging is a problem so again not a great all-rounder board.

So I would rather take a stab at a belt/chain drive first.

I had to pick some hub that would fit 11x6-6 tires. I also wanted to find a hub and tire/tube all on the same site.


it isnt mentioned if you can stack two of the spacers, I assume so but its not recommended for some reason.

This is what I settled with. The hub is technically a 5in wide hub with the 1in spacer but it will be fine enough to try with an XR tire. I am sure its heavier and more expensive than a more standard kart hub, but I like that the side of the rim is not super deep making it easy to attach a pulley.

I have a set of XR rails, a giant 12mm bolt that could serve as the axle, and now the wheel assembly. So next would be plan out the motor mounting and how the belt or chain fit within the frame.

13in tire, nice :grin:

I obviously have a feeling belt or chain drives should work in this application, and they bring a stack of advantages with them. Reliability is obviously a concern vs hub motors, but belts seem fine for use inside car engines and on motorcycles so they should be fine in this application.

The main roadblock for most of us is that things just don’t bolt together, and you end up needing a bunch of one-off special parts, eg. . .

Easy to design, expensive to get machined :sob:

If there’s ever a version 2 I’d probably try harder to use more kart parts. I use a fixed axle, but if I’d gone for a live axle I probably could have used a kart wheel hub, bearing flanges, axle, and possibly the pulley hub.

Not sure what you’re thinking of for a pulley, but a lot of superchargers use HTD 8m belts and have a design that could possibly work for a wheel like yours. Some modification would likely be required; a new hole pattern and these are usually for 80mm wide belts so you’d probably need to shave that down a bit.

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Yeah the draw to a live axle design is hard to resist. The main downside I see is you then need to make up for the lost structural rigidity compared to dead axle. What I actually like most about a live axle design is how the rails could become the gearboxes/chain guards. While that would be insanely cool the belt design like yours is functionally the same and so much easier to make and work on.

For a pulley with the GoPower Wheels I think a printed pulley would be ok for testing at first. Given the way it would be attached at a large diameter to the holes in the hub the load would be spread out quite a bit. Chain is what I actually want to try it with, a standard sprocket should fit fairly nice with just some simple bolts and spacer. Need to get the hub to see what the mounting will exactly be like.

Once the chain drive system is figured out then go about making a track drive to fit the same setup.

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rim with no spacer is 3in, plus 1in spacer 4in.




First random idea is use .5in id tubes as diy spacers. Then a 3d printed part to keep the tube in place.
Otherwise a more complicated diy spacer… or get a proper width hub :face_with_monocle:

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These features with the divots are perfect for adding a 3/6 bolt pattern for pulleys and sprockets.

next part is look at the motor mounting

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I have some thoughts on this stuff, especially when it comes to motor selection.

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Something expensive and inefficient like spiral bevel gears could also be used, to get around some of the packaging problems with normal belt/gear/chains

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That’s pretty close what I pictured. You could put the motor on the other side and drive belt or chain via a shaft.

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This hub has built in spacers for the sprocket. nice, cheaper too but no CNC looks like. or idk can’t see… prob just for the bearing :person_shrugging:


The same idea with long bolts + tube spacers to make it into ~6in rim width.

Im following…