Bearing Carrier for LM8UU Bearing

thingiverse

Printable bearing carrier for 3D printer or CNC. This is modeled after the aluminum bearing carriers for the 8mm bearings with a 15mm outer diameter that shipped with the original Anet A8 and many other 3D printers. When I bought my Anet A8 a few years ago, Anet had already replaced the bearing carriers with injection molded plastic carriers. Note that the plastic bearing carriers are identical to those that come with the Anet A8 Plus. When the bearings for the heated bed on my Anet A8 became sloppy I thought I might try the Igus dry bearings, however, the injection molded plastic carriers that came with my Anet A8 applied too much pressure to the Igus bearings causing them to be too tight on the rods for smooth even travel. I downloaded a model I found here on Thingiverse that looked just like the aluminum carriers which shipped with the classic Anet A8, but interfered with other mods to my printer, required excessively long screws, and had no provision for the retaining snap rings. I ordered some SC8UU carriers with bearings to play around with. I expected I'd be using the bearings from the SC8UU's with the original plastic carriers, but when the SC8UU's arrived, I noticed they were 2mm shorter on their height, and 1mm shorter on their length compared side by side with the carriers I'd downloaded from Thingiverse. The difference meant that the aluminum carriers would work as they were with the LM8 bearings without interfering with my printer. That meant also that I could try the Igus bearings installed in the aluminum carriers. I decided to to leave the SC8UU's intact and modeled these carriers from precise measurements I made of the aluminum carriers I'd purchased. I'm currently using these printed carriers with the Igus bearings on my Anet A8 and they work great. I've only been using the Igus bearings for a few weeks now so I can't comment on whether they'll hold up better than the standard LM8 bearings. This model will work with either the LM8UU bearings, or the Igus bearings. The only thing that differs physically between these and the aluminum carriers I bought are that instead of threading my screws into the plastic, I added provisions to slide M4 nuts in from the side, making them partially captive. They could also be used with stupidly long screws all the way through then nutted on the top. These carriers use the same 15mm internal snap ring that ships with the aluminum carriers. I ordered 100 of them on EBay and I think they cost me about $8.00. Be aware that while these holders work fine for the heated bed using the M4X8 screws that both my Anet A8 and A8 Plus use, that the 8mm long screws for connecting these to the hot end carriage are insufficient in a few places where they must go through parts that I've attached for other purposes. For the handful of screws that were just a bit too short to reach the captive nuts, I used M4X10mm socket head screws. If you have nothing attached to the carriage that the retaining screws don't have to go through first, you should be able to use the original hardware. For my carriage, I had to replace 5 of the 12 screws with with the 10mm long screws.