how beneficial is nophead's belt flip trick

In general, I'm very happy with the quality of prints I get from my printer, but of course there's always room for improvement. One thing that I notice is very slight vertical lines that are about 2mm apart. Since I am using gt2 belts, it occurred to me that this may be caused by the toothed belt on the smooth idler - then I remembered reading nophead's blog about flipping half the belt around so that the smooth back rides on the idler.

Has anybody tried this? Did you get noticeable improvement? Also, it seems to me that I shouldn't have to cut the belt; a simple half twist between the motor and the idler should suffice. If the belt is properly tensioned, the twist should never ride over either the idler or the toothed pulley. Does this seem right?

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 03/27/2013 12:11AM by jbernardis.

I think I would prefer to cut the belt, but would be interested in other peoples experience with twisted belts. Not sure if a twisted belt would work on the X axis though?
I wonder if another aluminium pulley would be a good option?

Twist works done on x. I do it and had a quality improvement as a result, particularly when using t5 belt.

The twist always distributes over the full length of the return path. It doesn't move with the belt. I.e. the belt rotates as it moves.

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Thanks nophead - I figured I'd hear from you on this. I will put the twist in as soon as I get a chance.

One other thing occurred to me though, based on 2 observations:
1) the lines I mention seem to occur worse near corners and edges, and in fact appear as "ripples" when next to circular openings.
2) they appear worse with objects sliced by skeinforge

Within skeinforge I am currently using the dwindle plugin which slows down the print head in discrete steps as it approaches the end of a thread. I have to take a look at the settings, but this may be more the culprit behind what I am seeing. If the discrete steps are all about 2mm apart, this could account for the ripple appearance nest to circular holes.

I had a problem like that. Reduce your acceleration

Well, i tried what Greg and Nophead suggested and did the "twist" on my X axis. This, coupled with my twin bearing X idler has given it a nice smooth motion and as Nop' alluded to, the vertical part of the twist always remains in the centre when the axis is travelling.
So, onto the Y axis...