Gatorback > Gates

usaf_branham said:

I figured that was the case. I just find it frustrating to search for the correct sized belt for a product that has been sold to another company. I got the gatorback for my old car when it was still owned by Goodyear. This continental elite was a pita to find.

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Almost every brand of belts has the sizing info encoded in their part number.

For example, a Drive-Rite (Dayco cheapie) 450K5 is a 45" belt with 5 ribs. A Dayco 5060910 is a 91" belt with 6 ribs (fox-body Mustang 5.0 belt, actually). Other brands do similar things, and most brands also use a metric belt system. The 5060910 is also known in the metric belt system as a 6PK2310, which means it's a 6-rib belt that is 2310mm long. That metric coding is pretty much universal across all brands, so if you can find it on your old belt, you can find that belt in another brand.

Sometimes you'll see some variance in belt length for an application between brands. It's frequently going to be Gates that is different, because they make more sizes. Their fox-body Mustang 5.0 belt is GK060905, which is a 6-rib belt that's 90.5" long. The 91" belt from Dayco and the 90.5 from Gates work equally well, and to be honest, in some cases you can go up or down a size in a pinch in a drive system with an automatic belt tensioner.

V-belts use a similar system when it comes to sizes, with Dayco's being the width of the belt first, followed by the length, in a 3-digit number.




(Back in 2003, when Advance was still a good company to work for, they actually used to train their counterpeople, and one of those trainings was an amazing little class from Dayco. I was actually the last person in my store to become a Dayco-certified belt specialist when there was such a thing, and to be honest, the knowledge was so relatively simple to remember, and came in so handy over the years, that I've never forgotten it.)