Cavalier C-51 Problem

[CoolCat]

I've been out of town... and itching to work on my little problems.  Thanks for all of you help, guys.

I seem to have finally fixed the problem with the ammo belt.   '> I broke down and emptied the machine, and took off the ammo belt.  I removed the ratchet assembly and lubricated it.  The biggest problem I had was not with rock-hard grease... A degreaser had taken care of that problem a while back.  The problem was that there was a small amount rust on the spindles (front and back) that was preventing the bearings from rotating freely.  So, I sanded the rusted areas... used a penetrating oil... cleaned that all up... then lubricated with lithium grease front to back.  Now everything turns smoothly.  I put enough grease on that I don't think I'll get any rust-back.  I have attached a picture of the ammo belt and lower spindles.

Another issue I noticed was that the way you run the ammo belt also has something to do with how the belt moves.  You can see in the picture that the belt rides in front of the center roller slightly... while the belt rides with its lips over the front and back of the spindle.    If I try to run the belt in this manner over the center roller, it binds up.  I also thought it might make things smoother if I ran the belt the same way (with the back of the belt in front of the rear lip of the roller and the front lip of the belt in front of the front lip of the roller) on the lower rollers.  This didn't work out very well.  After a couple of cranks, the belt would bind up on me.  At any rate, all seems to be cranking away with no problems at this point (knock on wood).

I also tried to quiet down the machine...  unfortunately, I haven't been as successful with this endeavor.  I have gotten things a little quieter by pulling the cap tubes and such away from the body of the machine, and tightening down the compressor mounts and fan mount.  This seems to only be a part of the issue.  I have not bolted down the deck, but that seems to be of little consequence based on my experiments to this point.  The good news is that it is quieter... the irritating thing is that I can always here a bit of compressor noise over the sound of the evaporator fan.  Is it possible that this compressor is just a little bit noisy?

By the way, I will post a couple of pics of the outside of my machine in the appropriate forum...  '>