Ballnut from plastic, worth to try?

[Ch_Irawan]

Hi,

I have some 25mm ballscrew stock without nut. I am thinking to make a tap from a short piece of the ballscrew and then tapping it to a thick block of plastic (acetal maybe?). Is it worth to try? What will be the problem?

-ichan

[steve323]

The whole point of using a ballscrew is that the rolling balls reduce friction to near zero. Making a tap from the rod will not provide clearance for the balls, loosing main the benefit of the ballscrew.

Steve

[ironDigit]

i guess that if it's a precisionrod you should atleast gain precisionmovement ,though you won't be able to profit from low-friction ballscrewaction like mentioned.

There shoul be absolutely no PROBLEMS so from my point of view if your expectaions aren't set to high you can'be disappointe and might very well end up with a nice precision leadscrew.

from theory i would say you will suffer less efficIency then even a acme leadscrew and nut meaning you'll need bigger steppers/servoos to accomplish same movement in length and speed when using acme and WAYYYY more offcourse when using ballscrews and nuts.

I don't think that's even a pence worth ,

[schbrownie]

You could possibly turn it into a lead screw. If you kept it as a ball screw, the metal balls would eat through the plastic nut in short order and you would constantly be replacing the nut.

If you just have a stanard ball screw, and you know who the manufacturer of the screw is, you can order just a replacement nut.

[Ch_Irawan]

Thanks to all the good points.

The reason behind the idea is I am now don't have any budget to buy the nuts .

The expectation is not high and I have some oversized stepper motor for this. Before the last comment above, I was still thinking about how to reduce the friction, shown as image attached.

Then I tend to agree with the last comment, the surface contact area is small compared to a lead screw. Now kicking myself out from this idea.

-ichan

[Claude Boudreau]

I got acetal nut with acme rod 1/2inch 10tpi. cant feel any backlash seem to hold on nicely on home made cnc router.
P.S. got the nut on ebay for 5 buck and acme locally. not worth the trouble of tapping.
Just not shure the tread on ballscrew are gonna be efficient with just a nut...