Ball Bearing - 7 balls - U support

thingiverse

After scanning Thingiverse last night for a ball bearing model with removable supports, I found nothing that caught my eye - so I decided to create one myself instead. The models on the site that already have built-in supports tend to be tricky to separate without damaging them. Recently acquiring Simplify 3D gave me the opportunity to utilize its manual support placement feature, which I thought was a great idea. The ball bearing itself took about 20 minutes to model in DesignSpark Mechanical. To achieve a clearance of 0.4mm between the ball's surface and the race walls, that's exactly what I did. However, printing it at 150% enlarged the clearance even more, making it quite sloppy. Additionally, the ratio of the ball diameter to the race circumference wasn't as tight as it should be, resulting in a lot of unnecessary play. I deliberately made my first attempt a bit loose to see how it would turn out. For those who want to quickly adjust these dimensions, the DesignSpark Mechanical RSDOC file is included here. Now that I've figured out how to add supports, I'm looking forward to creating a tighter version myself.