Tag Archives: ball bearings

It’s not just me!

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See!  Spacexula has discovered the hard way she’s a wicked temperamental woman!

Shattered acrylic plastruder…  Yikes!  I printed up one of Zaggo’s Prinstruders – but it appears to be optimized for an early MakerBot Batch 5 with large/small dinos.  If I wanted to use my printstruder I would need to pick up some of the extra parts required and essentially print up a small dino.1  However, I think I’d like to start replacing parts out of my MakerBot with printed parts so that I can keep the originals as backups.  However, I have a feeling a prinstruder out of ABS is going to be much more robust/resilient than the layered acrylic plastruder.  What do I need?

  • 2x 626 ball bearings.
  • 4x M4 bolts, 60mm long
  • 4x M4 nuts (optionally two of them as wingnuts)
  • 1x M6 bolt (30mm long)
  • 1x M6 nut
  • 3x M3 bolts (30mm long)
  • 3x+ M6 washers
  • 3x+M3 washers
  • 4x M4 washers

In addition to these parts, I’ll also need to measure my ‘bot for a small dino equivalent.  Since my extruder barrel is out of commission and the plastruder is just lying on the platform, this is as good a time as any to measure it up.

  1. Shopping list below [↩]

Ball bearings

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A standard MakerBot Cupcake CNC requires:

  • 8x 608 bearings for the four X axis threaded rods
  • 2x 608 bearings for the two Z axis pulleys
  • 1x 608 bearing for the X axis pulley
  • 1x 606 bearing for the Y axis pulley

With all the cool things that could be built with the addition of bearings to a MakerBot toolkit I wanted to pick up some additional bearings.  I figure I could print an improved version of my retractable spring loaded tape measure, the microlathe, and other cool things.

But, where to find these things?  My local hardware store didn’t carry them.  I went to a hobby shop nearby which had exactly two bearings for $5.  It sounded expensive, but I’d never priced bearings before and I really just wanted the two at the time.

A few weeks later I had a brainstorm.  Where could I find cheap skate ball bearings?  Well, why not a place that sells cheap skates!  I called my local used sporting goods store and they had a 16 pack of bearings for $5.  Right on.

Ball bearings

Ball bearings

Microlathe thoughts

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Cathal Garvey’s Mircolathe is a printable mini lathe made from MakerBot printable parts, ball bearings, a dremmel and other minor parts.

Microlathe by Cathal Garvey

Microlathe by Cathal Garvey

Now, I don’t have a dremmel… but from problems are born solutions.  Everyone has an electric drill, right?  What if the back of the left printable piece had a flathead screwdriver shaped hollow?  You could pop a flathead screwdriver bit into the drill, slide the drill up to the microlathe, put the screwdriver bit into the hollow and turn it on.