Anyone tried WOOD ?!

[powdersummit]

Solid wood isn't very stable especially with the type of moisture and temperature swings that would be associated with a drive roller. I was thinking about trying to make some blanks out of laminated wood kind of like plywood. My idea would be to take similar grain woods and laminated them together like a piece of a pie. Drill a hole in the center of the pie, put the blank over an arbor in a wood lathe and turn it. This would make a fairly stable driver roller that would be semi cheap to produce. Heck you could even try to laminate several different types of wood in the same piece. You could arrange the wood so that the grain went from the center out which in theory would reduce the amount of wear on the roller.

From there then a person could look into different types of finishing. Depending on how you made the roller you could sandblast the drive area to give a more textured surface for better grab of the tire. Then there are finishes that could make it even tougher. A few good coats of a oil based floor finish polyurethane would be a good starting point.

I still think the spray on bed liners for a pickup would be a feasible idea for coating a drive roller. Herculiner which is a roll on bed liner is a mixture of polyurethane and small rubber pieces that adheres to most surfaces as well as itself. Kind of off topic but it's an avenue worth exploring.

Carl