Yet another customizable bearing

thingiverse

This is actually a test of yesterday's evening-hack. It's redundant because there are many bearings available online and it's not useful since I have loads of cheap Chinese metal bearings in various sizes. I guess you probably do too. I made it to distract myself from another project, a heat-exchanger. Anyway, I'm sharing it for fun. Maybe someone likes the look of my rounded edges or maybe someone gets some inspiration from the code, like not to use basic object directives so much when constructing objects but to increase the use of linear_extrude() and rotate_extrude() with parameterized polygons stuck together with concat(). A good practice is changing the function kreislinie(), which returns the 2D-points of an arc, so that start- and end-angle can be overwritten by start- and end-height. This is also an experiment to give error messages and object information to the user via text output in customizer. Unfortunately, newline characters aren't rendered as such, so lines may get too long. Disable the option view_sectioned before you create your STL. It's default is yes because you should use it first to check if everything looks good inside. Try view_info in the design-check tab to see the overhang-angle of the chamfer to adjust your slicer not to support this overhang but the balls. The "au" setting reduces the number of balls by virtually enlarging the balls by this percentage and looking up the value of the largest inner circle that's smaller than the diameter of this inner circle. Don't set this too high because the bearing may then fall apart if all the balls are on one side. I haven't made a good print of this yet. The balls I print are too much in the shape of a pill. For me, balls are generally something difficult to print. I'll try less infill or less heatbed next time. Of course, it's best practice to find printing parameters that create good balls but it might be interesting to experiment with the shape of the balls anyway. Please give me advice in the comments if you know more about printing balls than me. So next step will be to make the shape of the balls customizable using rotate_extrude with a parametrized polygon, so I (or you) can try any instance of cylinder with rounded corners including ball, oval and cylinder. See also: http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:40559 History: 2016-07-28: Initial hack 2016-07-29: Published it. 2016-07-30: Changed the recursive lookup function to a function that calculates the value. Before: V_innerradiusses = [ for(i=[0:1:100]) ((i>2)?(sqrt(1+sqr(tan(90-(360/i/2))))-1):0) ]; function findbiggestsmaller(V, x, i) = (V[i+1] > x) ? i : findbiggestsmaller(V, x, i+1); Now: function balls_by_ri(ri,rb) = round((180/(90-atan(sqrt(sqr((ri/rb+1))-1))))-0.5); Print Settings Printer Brand: RepRap Printer: Prusa I3 Rafts: No Supports: Yes Resolution: 0.1 Infill: 50% Post-Printing On my next attempt, I'll try to rework the upsides of the balls on the heatbed when the balls still sit in their supports.