[martinw]

Hi Martin,

I used them on a plywood machine for over a year and had no problems. The dust was taken care of by the wipers and I did not use lubricant. To align them accurately I made a ply template and a hand router.

John

Dear John and Gerry,

John You mention wipers. The bearings I have seem to have a hard rubber ring at each end. Are these wipers?.. or is something else needed.

Gerry Thanks for the encouragement. I did a trial with a jig fence and spacer. My wonky drill press tended to deflect towards the front as the forces from the Forstner bit (32mm dia") tilted the table out of right angle with the drill press column. I clamped a vertical strut down to the floor to support the front edge of the table and that improved things massively.
The sample bearing housings and shaft supports seem to be pretty good, and are in line. Anyway, it was obviously not a "bodge and filler evening"..

Best wishes to all,

Martin

[ger21]

Martin, here's a little more detail of what I did. Attach all the parts together with double face tape, and drill the smallest size hole you'll need (shaft size?) through them all. When you tape them together, use a fence to aligh them too so one edge is aligned on all of them. Keep that edge to the fence on your drill press.

Once the first holes are drilled, take the parts apart. For the parts that need larger holes, first, with the smal forstner bit still in the drill press, bring the bit down into the hole to align the part, and clamp it in place on the table. Then remove the bit and put the larger one in, and drill the hole without unclamping the part. That will keep everything aligned about as close as possible with the tools you have.

Mine actually has some very slight binding at the very bottom of the travel, but it's not nearly enough to cause any problems.

[martinw]

Dear Gerry,

Thanks for that.

I used a different method this evening.

I cut all the MDF pieces (a) bearing mount and (b) shaft mount pieces ( four in total) noting which edges and faces went against the saw fence, the saw table, and the cross-cut slide on my saw. Marked them too. The general idea being that they should be pretty identical when oriented in the same way on the drill press jig.

Drill press jig was just a piece of MDF with a small fence. I put in a stop, and used the shaft distance spacer to reference drilling centres from the first hole to the second. They were drilled individually for the simple reason that my drill does not have enough vertical travel to do otherwise. No chance to stack pieces, and anyway, my drill will wander if they could be stacked.

The strut on the front edge of my drill table was just to prevent sag from a mightly cheap machine bought about 17 years ago. The helical coil spindle return spring gave up about 4 years ago. Makes for interesting proceedures...

Anyway,

The shaft mounts were screwed to 18mm MDF and the bearing mounts to another. It actually seems to work really well.

Best wishes,

Martin

[Oldmanandhistoy]

John You mention wipers. The bearings I have seem to have a hard rubber ring at each end. Are these wipers?.. or is something else needed.

Hi Martin,

Sorry I missed this post, for some reason I didn't get an email notification for a new post in this thread.

To answer your question if it’s not too late; yes the hard rubber rings are the wipers I was talking about.

BTW when I said I used no lubricant it is not strictly true, I gave the rails a wipe with WD40 from time to time.

John

[martinw]

Dear John,

Many thanks, and no, you are not too late.

Best wisges,

Martin

[martinw]

"wisges????

Martin