What Is An Alternative To Ball Bearings?
I have to design a linkage system and i would like to use ball bearings. however, ball bearings are too expensive. Is there anything i could use that does the same thing as ball bearings but are cheaper?
Categories: Ball Bearings Tags: Alternative, Ball, Bearings, What
A simple sleeve bearing such as a bushing type is about as cheap as you can get.
You can use all kinds of things as sleeve bearings, just depends on what kind of force, friction, speed, etc you need to handle. Also, you need to decide how long the thing needs to work.
For example, our dryer wore out the bearing surface on the drum. I found some heavy felt and made a new sleeve bearing from that.
In another case, I needed a crank handle to roll up fence wire. It needs to have little friction so we don’t fight it to work, but we just polished the pipe we sleeved over another piece of pipe and that was good enough.
Depends on the details: forces involved, how much friction you can tolerate, what is the surface speed of contact, vibration, how much heating will be acceptable, etc.
There are certainly other bearings available. One potential option, graphite impregnated copper. good luck
there are lots of different kinds of bearings:
sleeve bearings, roller bearings, needle bearings, hydrodynamic bearings, hydrostatic bearings, magnetic bearings, air bearings.
Nylon bearings are cheap and will serve for
low stress applications.
sleeve bearings
sling shot ammo and some packing greese would work,should be under 10 US dollars for a large ammount of them