Clutch or One Way Bearing - Print in Place

thingiverse

This is a fun little one-way bearing I designed with my son, to be printed in place. As you can seen in the cutaway, rollers have a flared middle and flared ends to hold them more or less parallel to the axis of rotation. All the flares are at 45degrees, so you shouldnt need to worry about supports. In the other cutaway, you can see how when the bearing rotates one way, the bearings can spin, but in the other direction, the rollers are pinched between the inner and outer races, causing them to bind or mechanically couple. The bearing is 50mm diameter and 20mm thick, but could easily be resized. I've included the SolidWorks file for anyone who wants to monkey with it further. The gaps between the parts is something that can be tuned to make the bearing tighter if you felt so inspired. I set the gaps at 0.4mm, but it's possible to do smaller and not have the parts fuse. All in all, the bearing spin / slide pretty well - not the best free-spinning bearing I've made, but with the clutch feature, I think it's a pretty good compromise.