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If doing it with an engine and pulleys is the approach you are most familiar and comfortable with, then that is a perfectly good reason to use that approach. The cool stuff about these projects is that there are lots of right answers and you pick the one that works best for your situation.
A few other thoughts:
The suggestion made by ibdennyak of using a hydrostatic transmission from an old lawn tractor is a really good one. If you drive that with your gas engine (which is what it was designed for in the first place anyhow) the output side will give you variable speed and chances are good that the speed range will be much closer to what you want for your feeder anyhow. You can tweak the final speed range with pulleys, etc. Excellent suggestion I think.
Thanks for the video of how the wheel drive works. Interesting mechanism, thanks for educating me on that.
As for the three lobed cam on the wheel drive setup, rather than making the ratchet move more teeth each throw, could you make that into a six lobed cam so it moves twice as often? Or maybe move the cam off of the wheel axle onto its own shaft that is chain driven off the wheel at twice the speed? I suppose you could add levers to make the throw twice as long, not sure how easy that would be.
You could always cut some scale linkages out of cardboard, nail them to a piece of wood and try adding stuff to mess around with different arrangements. Sort of a backyard CAD system.
Fun stuff just to think about.
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