Re: [ATM] Comment on Crayford construction

["Don Clement" <don_clement@charter.net>]

And now for something completely different! I went a new route and
eliminated those pesky issues of dew, dust or grit contamination, wear, and
lubrication with sliding or rolling bearings by going intermolecular with
flexural bearings.



Alexander Slocum "Precision Machine Design" p521:

 "Sliding, rolling, and fluid film bearings all rely on some form of
mechanical or fluid contact to maintain the distance between two objects
while allowing for relative motion between them. Flexural bearings (also
called flexural pivots), on the other hand, rely on the stretching of atomic
bonds during elastic motion to attain smooth motion. Since there are
millions of planes of atoms in a typical flexural bearing, an averaging
effect is produced that allows flexural bearings to achieve atomically
smooth motion. For example, flexural bearings allow the tip of a scanning
tunneling microscope to scan the surface of a sample with subatomic
resolution*

*See, for example, G. Binning and H. Rohrer, "Scanning Electron Microscopy",
Helv. Phys. Acta, Vol. 55, 1982.pp 726-735



Don Clement

Running Springs, California

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