linear bearings for milling machine

Does anyone have information about the use of linear bearings as the beds

in homemade lathes and milling machines??

Welcome aboard, ntambomvu

Not specifically ... but they do work very nicely on microscope stages and such.

The steady load capacity can be astonishingly high, but I suspect you may have problems [bearing tracks pitting] caused by vibrations that are transmitted from the cutter. It really depends what sort of work you are expecting the machine to do.

... A heavily built machine, taking light cuts, could be fine.

What do you have in mind?

MichaelG.

Edited By Michael Gilligan on 17/09/2012 21:51:34

Most commercial machines now use linear bearings for the bed ways instead of slides.

Hello Micheal- nice to meet you

I recently bought a cheap bench lathe and have fitted it with servos and am running mach3

There have been many problems. Fitting limit switches,fitting home switches making fittings for the ball screw - routing wiring away from interference ( mechanical and electric) ts.

Other issues are that the gearbox is noisy and the speed range is inadequate.

So instead of messing around with something of known dubious quality- I am going to

convert it back to original and rather build myself a new all electronic lathe. I am sure it will

probably be cheaper ( and better) than trying to work with something junky and badly made.

( one of the things that I had to do was to strip down the gearbox completely and take about a teaspoonful of foundry sand our that had been left there.

regarrdes fred

Fred ... that's much easier name.

O.K. that sounds like a good plan.

It would be worth looking at the components available from Marchant Dice.

[they also trade on ebay, so you might find a bargain]

Provided that you keep a realistic balance between the "weight" of the machine, and the loads you expect to put on it; the only real problem will keeping the dust and swarf out of the linear bearings.

Good luck ... and please keep us informed of progress.

MichaelG.