24 Hour Torture Test of 3D Printed Bearings 

I wanted to correct a very obvious mistake I made in the video! I was recorded this after a long day of school and clearly my brain was gone. the shaft was rotating at 11rpm which is NOT 110 rev/min like I said. It is 66rev/min which translates to 95,040 revolutions in total over 24 hrs and 47,520 revolutions in total over the 12 hour span.

These are super awesome. THank you so much for designing these and making them available. :D

Absolute fantastic work these bearings look great. I'm excited to see where this goes. (great Thumbnail btw)

Nice work, I did a similar test, but at higher speeds and for less time. I’m always amazed by how well they hold up

Been waiting for a video like this! Thank you!

This is beautiful work.

Did you lubricate the bearings before running them? If not, they hold up quite well! I'd imagine a bit of lube would go a long way

Your videos are super high quality, surprised to see only a triple digit subscriber count.

Very impressive what you did there!

Very cool! Looking forward to the robot dog. Love me some robot dogs. Subscribed!

Great video!

Nice job!

~66 RPM btw. Nicely done, and well tested. Bravo.

These are awesome! Cost is definitely a factor when doing hobby projects, and this makes more projects more accessible for people. Thanks for sharing. Now what to build?

Nice design 👍

Have you considered making the bearings out of the more exotic high strength filament?

I would be very curious what dimension is distorting under load. One idea I want to try, (or see tried) is to take advantage of thermoplastic creep to force mechanical dimensions that loose their true initial shape, back into optimal parameters. It would be kind of like a "self sharpening chainsaw blade attachment" but for plastic, either adding or removing plastic at specific points with a constant spring loaded force.

Creative video, thanks for sharing :)

Do these BB's have a 'flat'? (BB's used to). Only thing I can add to this EXCELLENT idea is you can get a bag of bearing balls which are mirror steel on AliExpress for really cheap. Totally going to try this.

Really nice job. Those bearings are huge. Apologies if you said it in the video and I just missed it, but how tough is it getting the bearings into the center race on the triple-bearing print?

nice i like this idea a lot

when you print multiple layers of the same print, do you need to print additional bearing cages as well?

not just cool, rly cool. Attempted something like this long ago with plastic bb's so it was a chemical resistant being, didn't hold up to the speeds i wanted but i might revisit with your design!

Nice job with the metal bearings. I’ve made ball-less bearings for low load applications like the roller for my filament holder. I wonder how they would hold up on this kinda of testing.

Very nice bearings. The shape looks similar to a ceramic bearing I’ve got in the workshop. Do you print them 100% fill? Subscribed, I love this kind of thing :) ps does heat become a problem?

Does plastic wear less the more surface area is contacted or would that just create more thermal issues?

Is this going to become a song I’m waiting

Are aerodynamic air bearings possible with PLA for high rpm?

i wonder ifa carbon fiber or a glass reinforced nylon filament would be substantially better or not

I'd consider using roller bearing design for the triple in future if can get ahold of the rollers they might held lower wear as the weight distribution is significantly better than a ball

Did you lube your 24h bearings?

Great video and testing! For the record, though, 11 rotations every 10 seconds is 66 RPM (not 110 RPM) so that's probably going to throw off your total rotations pretty significantly.

Nice! If you make a pair of angular contact bearings, that would allow you to simply squeeze out any play that might develop over time.

This video showed up on my feed and I just clicked on it while not really thinking about it. I had no interest in ball bearings whatsoever and am not building anything. Now I am 12 minutes in and must say: I kind of got interested. :)

have you tried using filament cut to length as roller bearings?

5:00, “11 revolutions every 10 seconds”, that isn’t 110 rpm, there are only 60 seconds in a minute, it is 66 rpm. “Thin PLA 3D Printed Bearings”, then prints the strongest out of PETG.

Very interesting! A few thoughts on wear: - lubrication (obviously) - Nylon (you need a nylon-capable printer obviously, which I don’t yet myself) - I suspect that much of the wear is just the high parts of the layer lines wearing away. I’d think that the wear rate would decrease once the high points are worn down. I wonder how it would work to print with slightly over-tight clearance and then sand the races lightly to give a smoother surface? - someone else mentioned electroplating, but I wonder if some UV-curing resins might be harder than the PLA? I’m thinking in a similar direction to the last note: just fill in the low points in the layer lines a little bit to provide more contact surface area. - I wonder if the smoother surfaces of actual ball bearings would reduce wear? BBs are certainly cheap and pretty smooth, but extremely smooth vs just very smooth might make a difference. (None if this would be an issue for your robot dog use case; you’re not going to be running the joints 24/7 for months on end :-) Great, great work!

I am really impressed with the result, and I am greatly interested in plastic made bearings, for rust proof bearing, using stainless steel BBs, for creating my own ECM lathe, (I will just have to find a way to get current into the immerged chuck, without any contact with the highly salty water solution as I would get extremely quick corrosion, maybe thanks to a usual steel bearing encased in an oil filled cavity, I will see) but I have a little question : how do you fill the multi-layer bearing of it's ball bearings : is the balls separator in several pieces and each level gets filled mid print ? Is it filled post-print going layer by layer with a splitted ball separator ? Thanks a lot for the video, it gives a lot of ideas

I have a small PLA part for my home that kept breaking, and i just kept printing more. I find pla can be quite brittle and thin parts like this can be especially fragile, but I guess depends on the exact plastic and perhaps the degree of crystallization. But I tried the fancy 3d870 pla resin, annealing, nothing seemed to work. I switched the part to a PHA resin from regen and It hasn't cracked since.

You can have Chinese bearing very cheap provided that you design with bearing dimensions widely use. They will be better than any pla bearing, but pla bearing are very interesting for prototype and validation of concept .

How do you double or triple these bearings? I apologize and advance for this stupid question.

Amazing! Could you please tell us where did you get the balls and what are they made out of?

4012 lane bearing needs to be a thing

If you want some more axial load capabilities and still be single groove, you could design something like a magneto, angular contact, or deep groove. im sure you already know of these just thought I would mention it

I'd like to see the method for packing the multi-layer bearings.

nice

thats metal ball in those bearing? i put the printer in pause at half way then put the metal ballz by hand and continue the printer?

Did you lubricate them before running them?

I want to build some larger bearings. Where do you buy the ball bearings?

cool

You probably thought of this already, maybe ruled it out because of difficulty getting the pins, but could needle style bearings with pins instead of balls wear better on the plastic? Seems like the spread out contact point would work better for plastic. BTY no engineering experience

How did you assemble these bearings?

Your math is off. 11 revolutions per 10 seconds doesn't equal 110 revolutions per minute as there's only 60 seconds in one minute.

emmett made a OpenSCAD file for his gearbearing. you can actually get away with very big/thin bearings. Try playing around with it a bit maybe. edit. i really like your approach tho, the tolerances of the bearings seem really good. roundness seems to could be improved a tad but still very nice :D also PETG is quite durable for such applications and lasts in mineral oil for ages. nylon (PA12 or PA6) would be okay too but PETG is overall a lot less hassle to get tuned in properly. And for the sizes of bearing you would need. they are expensive as heck. sadly. peace o/

on voit des encoches de remplissage pourquoi merci

It looks like the balls could be spaced closer together. This will spread the load out better and should decrease the wear quite a bit as they ball do not need to sink into the race that much.

Put a magnet on it

This was great work(!) I just came across a design yesterday that uses wires for the ball races that you might also be interested in. They add another step (you need to ring-roll the wire), but still extremely low cost and they should be much more rugged than having the bearings run directly against the plastic: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-xbGtqpgfdRM.html (The creator says he’ll share the F360 files with people if they ask. He’s apparently not posting them himself because they’re highly parameterized and quite complex, and I guess he doesn’t want to be swamped with random questions.) The straight plastic bearings you designed are almost certainly fine for your robot-dog use case, but I thought you might find the wire-race approach interesting 👍😁

Will a stack of triples (like 3 or 4 triples) hold up to a lathe headstock if lubed well?

Would be interesting to use them on a skateboard

Where can i buy those bearings like each single one

I see the casings and retainers in the downloads but what about the balls?

you need a dialgauge and a press :D

I think cooling is very important

11revs 10s 110revs 60s 🙄

Petg has a higher melting point.

This is not a problem you can solve with a 3D printed part in plastic. Search for "Frictionless Bearings - Technical Secrets Explained!" here on YT. 24 hours? might es well be 5 minute test when it comes to bearings. Go skate with it and report back 😁

Great video!