3D Printable Bearings That Actually Work, No CAD Tweaking Required

September 17, 2022 by Donald Papp 22 Comments

3D printing bearings with an FDM printer can be an iffy endeavor, but it doesn’t have to be that way. [Matvey Kukuy]’s Ultimate 608 Bearing with Calibration Kit is everything you’ll need to dial in and print functional 608-style print-in-place bearings on your 3D printer.

Calibration pieces have a handy label attached for identification.

[Matvey] found that there are two key tolerances to get right. And by “get right” he means “empirically determine which works best with your filament and printer”. But don’t worry, there’s no need to get into CAD work to make that happen. [Matvey] has exported a staggering 64 slightly different calibration models (and their matching production versions) along with a printable testing tool. With the help of a step-by-step process that resembles a sort of binary search, one can take the Goldilocks approach to find just the right model for one’s filament and printer in a minimum of steps.

There’s one more tip as well: [Matvey] says that once you determine the best model to use, don’t fill the print bed with copies, unless you want a bed full of possibly non-working bearings! Why is this? A 3D printer prints a bed full of objects slightly differently than it prints a single one, and since the margin for error on the perfectly-selected bearing is so small, that can be enough to keep it from working. To print more than one bearing at a time, position them far from each other and use something like PrusaSlicer’s sequential printing, which is an option to print each object completely before starting the next one.

[Matvey]’s own best results came from printing with PLA at a layer height of 0.16 mm. He also used grease in the bearing to improve performance and extend its life. He doesn’t specify what kind of grease he used, but we’d recommend a plastic-safe grease like PTFE-based Super Lube.

Have you used 3D printed bearings in a project? Would [Matvey]’s design be helpful to you? Let us know all about it in the comments.

Finding Perfect Part Fits With The Goldilocks Approach (and OpenSCAD)

June 9, 2020 by Donald Papp 33 Comments

There is something to be said for brute force or trial-and-error approaches to problems, especially when finding a solution has an empirical element to it. [Tommy] perceived that to be the case when needing to design and 3D print servo horns that would fit factory servos as closely as possible, and used OpenSCAD to print a “Goldilocks array” from which it was possible to find a perfect match for his printer by making the trial and error process much more efficient. By printing one part, [Tommy] could test-fit dozens of options.

What made doing this necessary is the fact that every 3D printer has some variance in how accurately they will reproduce small features and dimensions. A 6.3 mm diameter hole in a CAD model, for example, will not come out as exactly 6.3 mm in a 3D-printed object. It will be off by some amount, but usually consistently so. Therefore, one way around this is to empirically determine which measurements result in a perfect fit, and use those for production on that specific 3D printer.

That’s exactly what [Tommy] did, using OpenSCAD to generate an array of slightly different sizes and shapes. The array gets printed out, servos are test-fitted to them, and whichever option fits best has its dimensions used for production. This concept can be implemented in any number of ways, and OpenSCAD makes a decent option due to its programmatic nature. Interested in OpenSCAD? It will run on nearly any hardware, and you can get up and running with the basics in probably less than ten minutes.