parametric, printable ball bearing / roller bearing

thingiverse

I wanted to see if it's possible to create a printable small ball bearing, so I made an OpenSCAD file with all parameters visible for easy tweaking. This default is the 21/7/8 ball bearing I experimented with, which prints fine in PLA on my Prusa3d without support, but does require some mechanical work to separate - still seems to work well though! The model I ended up with is a roller bearing where the big part of the roller is on the outside, making it stick better to the print surface. Both models can be customized in the OpenSCAD customizer. Tweak the parameters, print it out, and report back with your results!