{"id":430,"date":"2008-12-21T17:08:52","date_gmt":"2008-12-21T22:08:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.summet.com\/blog\/?p=430"},"modified":"2018-05-02T11:12:25","modified_gmt":"2018-05-02T16:12:25","slug":"angle-iron-bearings-and-z-axis","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.summet.com\/blog\/2008\/12\/21\/angle-iron-bearings-and-z-axis\/","title":{"rendered":"Angle-Iron bearings and Z-axis"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Angle<\/a>

Angle Iron's with skate bearings mounted using bolts<\/p><\/div>\n

I decided that a full set of 3 bearings at 120 degree intervals<\/a> would take too much alignment and precision so I fell back to the tried and true home-brew DIY pipe and bearing system that uses 90 degree angle iron with skate bearings bolted to it. I used steel angle iron that is 1\/8 inch thick and 3\/4 inches wide. It cost me $11.23 for a four foot length at my local (over-priced) hardware store. I also purchased eight 1\/4 inch bolts, nuts, and nylon lock nuts to hold my bearings for $8.48. (If you purchased bulk boxes the hardware cost would be much cheaper!) <\/p>\n

Note that skate bearings have an interior diameter of 8mm which is very close to a 5\/16 bolt, but I’m using 1\/4 inch bolts and a plastic spacer that I got from disassembling a pair of in-line skates. I had to use a rotary tool with a cutting disk to shorten the plastic spacers to make the nuts clamp down onto the bearings. If you do not have a ready supply of plastic spacers, simply buy 5\/16 bolts instead, and wrap the bolt with a turn of plastic tape to get them all the way up to 8mm. With my 1\/4 inch bolts, I drilled the holes centered between 5\/16 and 3\/8 of an inch from the outside edge of the 3\/4inch angle iron.<\/p>\n

I cut the back plate, pipe supports, cart, and bearing supports from a single piece of 3\/4 inch MDF board purchased from the IKEA as-is room for $1. The back plate is 11 inches wide by 12inches high. (The black pipes are 12 inches long.) At the top and bottom of the back plate I have cut out 3 inch tall (by 11 inches wide) pieces of MDF that will support my two black pipes. The pipes have about 1 inch of thread on each end, leaving 10 to 10.5 inches of usable travel space. I want the cart to have at least five inches of travel, so I made it and the angle-iron bearing holders 5 inches long. I also cut out two 5 inch by 2 inch pieces of MDF that mount to the back of the cart to support the bearings. When cutting (imprcisely) with my jig-saw, I made sure that I used factory edges of the MDF when butting pieces together, so that my badly tilting jigsawed edges would not throw my 90 degree angles out of alignment.<\/p>\n

\"MDF<\/a>

MDF z-axis cart with angle-iron bearings<\/p><\/div>

\"Z-axis<\/a>

Z-axis cart with bearings. Z-axis base is under cart<\/p><\/div><\/p>\n

Here you can see a video of the pipe in motion being supported by the bearings on the z-axis cart:
\n<\/object><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I decided that a full set of 3 bearings at 120 degree intervals would take too much alignment and precision so I fell back to the tried and true home-brew DIY pipe and bearing system that uses 90 degree angle … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-430","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-projects"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.summet.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/430","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.summet.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.summet.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.summet.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.summet.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=430"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.summet.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/430\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4608,"href":"https:\/\/www.summet.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/430\/revisions\/4608"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.summet.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=430"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.summet.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=430"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.summet.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=430"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}