Removing the drive belt is an easy task.

The belt is a toothed or cogged belt, which means it's going to have to go. Why? Well, at the speeds that we're shooting for a cogged belt will be ripped to shreds, and believe it or not we need to accommodate a "little" slip between the belt and the pulley upon start-up, so as I said, the toothed belt was bad news. Notice that the shaft at the center of the small pulley is now sticking out from the pulley just a bit. This is because I twisted it back on the shaft after noticing that in the previous staged photo that I failed to spin it all the way down for the previous pic. Anyway, grabbing the belt and pulling it away from the sander while rotating the large pulley slowly was all it took to remove the belt.