Ballscrew thrustbearing support?

[chrugel]

Hi,
I've been reading quite a lot about ballscrew end-supports lately and can't seem to find much infor about the use of regular thrust bearings for this purpose.
Is there any reason why this shouldn't work?

This must be a rather cheap solution compared to angular paired bearings?
I paid about 4$ each for 8mm thurst bearings from smbbearings.com

See attached drawing.
The reason for using a retainer ring is so i still can use the axel for my US digital on-axel-encoder. This would be difficult if the axel were threaded??

regards
Chris

[jacek.jerzy]

In fact this type of bearing arrangement was used by many machine tool manufacturers in the past. I have seen exactly this arrangement on an older Mazak M4. The reason why machine tool manufacturers have changed to angular contact ball bearings is that angular contact ball bearings allow much higher rotational speed which is required for fast rapid feed.

[RICHARD ZASTROW]

Also improved accuracy and fewer parts.