The anodized body of the drag knife on the left measures exactly 12.0 mm OD:
Which happy fact suggested I might be able to use a standard LM12UU linear bearing, despite the obvious stupidity of running an aluminum “shaft” in a steel-ball bearing race:
The 12 mm section extends about halfway through the bearing, with barely 3 mm extending out the far end:
Because the knife body isn’t touching the bearing for the lower half of its length, it’ll probably deflect too much in the XY plane, but it’s simple enough to try out.
As before, the knife body’s flange is a snug fit in the hole bored in the upper disk:
This time, I tried faking stripper bolts by filling the threads of ordinary socket head cap screws with epoxy:
Turning the filled section to match the thread OD showed this just wasn’t going to work at all, so I turned the gunked section of the threads down to about 3.5 mm and continued the mission:
Next time, I’ll try mounting the disk on telescoping brass tubing nested around the screws. The motivation for the epoxy nonsense came from the discovery that real stainless steel stripper bolts run five bucks each, which means I’m just not stocking up on the things.
It slide surprisingly well on the cut-down screws, though:
Those appliqué templates came from patterns for a block in one of Mary’s current quilting projects, so perhaps I can be of some use whenever she next needs intricate cutouts.
The OpenSCAD source code as a GitHub Gist:
If you need The Real Thing ™, it looks like mscdirect dot com is running about a dollar cheaper. No obvious minimum quantities, and they’re US made.
OT: the pumphouse solar project is getting final inspections tomorrow. Whew! (Murphy-related issues ended up costing me about $400, though the screwed up mounting brackets (got the torque specs mixed up and bent them) will be useful in non-critical applications. Not bad for a multi-thousand dollar project.)
Aye, if only I knew what I needed … and didn’t need a different handful later.
I just re-upped my crude boring skills and eventually cleared a 10 mm hole through a 25 mm section of 12 mm linear bearing, with a reshaped drag knife body epoxied therein. More on this later; it looks a whole bunch less awkward and has a better chance of smooth operation.
When you finish with all your original body parts, it’s all good!