Printed bearing, non-printed balls

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Published on November 4, 2010
This thing was Featured on November 4, 2010

Description

By avoiding the need to print the spherical balls necessary for a ball bearing, I my design is nearly as small as a stock 608 bearing.

This is still a proof of concept, and not meant to immediately work. The little plastic tab does not adequately fit into the slot on the outer ring. In a further redesign I would shrink both rings to exactly match the dimensions of a 608 bearing and move the hole for filling the bearing to the inner ring.

For the spherical balls inside I tested the small plastic pellets from craft stores used to stuff knitted/crocheted objects. As long as I chose the more spherical ones, these were reasonably acceptable. Unfortunately, as these pellets were not very uniform I spent too much time picking out the best bits.

However, I found a much greater success with using small 3mm spherical beads from a craft store. These were all essentially identical in size and shape. All of the parts have a hole through the center, for them to be used as beads, but this feature did not appear to impact the functioning of the ball bearing.

Instructions

Print interior and exterior rings.
Fill bearing with small spherical objects of approximately 3mm in diameter.
Cover hole with tape.
Rotate as desired.
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Alternative might be to cut filament and make it a pin-bearing.

I like the operator stop idea to fill it before covering the top.

Why not just use plastic BBs, such as those used for airsoft? they're cheap, round,and easy to find.

Those airsoft BB's are 6mm in diameter. A 608 bearing is 7mm tall - which doesn't leave a lot of room for error. I think you can find metal BB's as small as 4.5mm, which might work.

Wow! This would be great for very smooth bearings!

Though it would be faster to print it all in one go than having to put it together

It would be slightly faster to print them all in one go - but this way there is no potential for strings and no interior clean up at all. Just print both parts singly, fill with beads, pop together.