Thursday, March 17, 2016


Rolling mill design changes. The previous mill frame was huge and difficult to make without making some big iron castings. I don't know anyone who can make a high quality ductile or nodular iron casting in the hundreds of pounds for a one off part without it being way too expensive. The critical/stressed members of the frame do not need to be integrated directly into the parts that keep the frame from falling over. The above frame ^^^ is machined from 2x3x8" 1018CR or hot roll bar stock. with alloy/chrome wear proof steel guide rods also running in bronze bushings. All bores are press fit. There are no standard sized pillow block bearings in this design, just 1 1/4" ID bronze bushings or some heavy duty roller or maybe double taper bearings. I'd like to load this into solidworks for FEA to see if my dimensions are sane. This model is built in OnShape, which is a cloud based CAD SAAS. It would be really really cool if they did FEA.