garyhlucas
Stainless
- Joined
- Oct 17, 2013
- Location
- New Jersey
I am designing a lathe-like grooving machine for a customer. It grooved 1-1/2” & 2” plastic pipe on each end. The goal is tovautomatically adjust the cross-slides and tail stock for 4 different lengths and 2 diameters. A pick & place mechanism will remove the finished pipe and put another pipe in the lathe right off the extrusion line.
I’ve been thinking the typical 2 parallel rails with 4 bearing blocks for the tailstock, cross slides and pick&place slides. However I’ve been wondering about simply using one or two bearings on a much larger rail to get the required loading moments.
The advantages I see are built in accuracy because of no need for rail to rail and bearing alignment. Lots less fasteners, holes and complexity of mating parts. Actual cost of rails and bearings looks like a wash. Ball screws are still the same size and the larger rails and bearings make room for a ballscrew assembly along one side without a bunch of spacers and such. The customers maintenence people struggle with precision assembly so replacing bearings and rails after millions of cycles should be easy.
Thoughts, suggestions, recommendations?
I’ve been thinking the typical 2 parallel rails with 4 bearing blocks for the tailstock, cross slides and pick&place slides. However I’ve been wondering about simply using one or two bearings on a much larger rail to get the required loading moments.
The advantages I see are built in accuracy because of no need for rail to rail and bearing alignment. Lots less fasteners, holes and complexity of mating parts. Actual cost of rails and bearings looks like a wash. Ball screws are still the same size and the larger rails and bearings make room for a ballscrew assembly along one side without a bunch of spacers and such. The customers maintenence people struggle with precision assembly so replacing bearings and rails after millions of cycles should be easy.
Thoughts, suggestions, recommendations?