Re: Guides

I couldn't find precision linear slides at a decent price either. I thought for sure this thread would turn up a low cost source. I deal mainly with MSC. They have linear bearings, but they don't give them away.

I ended up making my own linear slides using 1/4 bore sealed ball bearings. The tracks are plain old angle iron. It took some doing to get the angle perfectly flat on the bearing surface, but I got it to within .002 on the Z height from table corner to table corner on a 5 foot table. If I did it again, I would make the rails out of cold rolled steel flat stock.

My lead screws are all chain driven with #35 chain. The machine runs basically all the time and I have not seen any problems yet. It's longest continuous run was 42 hours. The repeatability is quite good. I can go from one end of the table to the other, then back again and there is no noticable misalignment.

I wanted to go with timing belt drive on the lead screws, but I couldn't find the right length belts for the X axis, so I went with chain.

Ross