Bearings, Bushings and Bars

My last post started a discussion about why I got only a few hundred hours of use from PLA bushings and in particular commercial IGUS bushings. I think I mounted the IGUS bushings well enough. I printed PLA holders and reamed them to a 10mm bore, which gave a nice press fit.

I had intended to use a small self tapping screw to retain the flange but found I didn't need them. That is what the two holes are for. They are triangular because they are polyholes.

The holders have slotted screw holes and were screwed to the underside of my Prusa's Dibond Y carriage. I started with them loose and then tightened the screws as I ran the axis up and down to ensure they were aligned well. I then applied lithium grease.

When first fitted they had no slop and very low friction. After a few days of continuous use the holes in the bushings had elongated and there was noticeable slop. At that point I replaced them with LM8UU bearings in prototype bearing holders I designed for the Mendel90.

These have run for thousands of hours with no noticeable wear. They do have more friction than bushings though. It seems higher to start with but they seem to "wear in" quite quickly and it drops.

My suspicion was that the surface quality of the stainless steel rods that I used was to blame, so I have just had a look with a microscope.  I used a cheap USB "Traveller" microscope from Aldi and a times 4 objective lens. The magnification is much greater than that though when photographed and blown up to screen size. 

Here are a couple of pictures of an off-cut from the stainless steel rods I used on my Mendel: -

Obviously you can only have a small strip in focus due to the curvature of the rod but you can see it looks far from smooth. The difference between the pictures is mainly the lighting angle.

Here is a mild steel rod bought on eBay, sold for Reprap use, so probably typical of what most people use: -



Quite a lot smoother, so hopefully most people get better life from PLA bushings than I did.

Here is a bright steel rod from a 2D printer, or maybe a flat bed scanner, I can't remember which, but it will have used bushings: -



It seems to have a finer grain structure but doesn't look particularly smooth.

And here is a "precision round rail (Induction Hardened)" sold for use with linear bearings that I got from Zapp Automation.



It looks the best out the four, so I guess you get what you pay for.

I think for soft bushings to last you need high quality rods. LMUU bearings seem to be more tolerant.