Has anyone attempted to bend OpenRail on a radius so wheels travel in a circle? If it would work, I'm considering a 30" radius (5ft circle) and using 4 or 5 sections to form the circle. Thoughts? Is this a bad idea? If so, maybe I could have have 45deg angles machined on both sides of 3/16" x 1" stainless then bent on a 30" radius for the V-wheels to run/ride on. Bending OpenRail would save machining costs. Thoughts?
The snag is, it is designed not to bend, hence all the integral shapes built into it. It is the same principal as corrugated iron. If it were a solid piece of aluminium, it would, with great care, bend to a certain degree,Openrail will most likely buckle internally before you could get any sort of significant curve. Gray
GrayUK, are your comments are about OpenRail or V-slot Linear Rail? The product in this picture is OpenRail.......
The only potential problem would be knocking the 45 degree angles at the top off a slight bit. which would in turn affect how the wheels ride. How critical that will be all depends on how tight your tolerance requirements are and what you are using it for. Shouldn't be an issue to bend though. You might just order up a couple of sticks and give it a try as it would not really be that expensive of an experiment if it fails (assuming you're in the US of course or somewhere that has a distributor).
For this application, position tolerance is no issue. Just need wheels to roll around a 60" circle while supporting a carriage hanging below with a 15lb load.
