If he could get the air blowing hard enough you can get the bearing to float on it.

That is precisely what is done in some scientific equipment (used in NMR spectrometry of solid materials)-- a small rotor is spun by air in an air bearings. For very tiny rotors of 0.7 mm in diameter, the speed can be quite high -- in excess of 100000 revolutions *per second*.

Beware the Magnus Effect on that causing lift off of your bearing plate. It needa to be enclosed and magnetically centered also.

Tyler Hargrove, interesting thought. I wonder how fast something would have to spin for it to drag in outside air at over 60psi

@@pyromen321 The more immediate -- and a very serious concern is that if you spin anything fast enough, it bursts --and then shrapnel flies literally like bullets. Jesse Wakefield Beams was a scientist who developed very high speed centrifuges. If you look up his papers, he shows examples of sizable steel rotors bursting like artillery shells when spun at some fraction of a million rpm.

For those interested: kzfaq.info/get/bejne/rJOdiq6Q0Mm-fac.html

This is why I love KZfaq! You literally can't get this content anywhere else. Not even Mythbusters is geeky enough for my needs!

Giggled when I saw that.

The last video had a wonderful contender though, "But anyway, back to this ion gun..."

Even carbon filters baffle me. In glad they filter my water

The grain size of the block defines the cost and quality of the graphite block. Mostly used as electrodes for EDM( Electro discharge machining

@@manishiyer23 Do you happen to know what grain size is needed for the air bearing in this video? I bought a pice of graphite and it barely has any pores. I read some research on increasing the amount of pores in graphite but there were different techniques for different pore sizes.

@Robert Slackware I think they mean that the graphite isn't level and therefore the item in the bearing has more weight to one side of the bearing. This allows slightly more air out of the other side and allows it to spin up. Think about holding the bearing in it's side with the ball in it, the ball will be pulled down by gravity, reducing the air gap on that side and allowing air out of the other which then allows it to spin up.

@@alastairholland4433 exactly, new way air bearing did a demonstration using pressure on one of their air bearings as a method of controlling the direction of a thin film-like conveyor held over a set of external cylindrical graphite bearings.

I was wondering what the expected runout on the centerless ground shaft would be half way down it's length with a dial test indicator and a one sided airbearing.

@Robert Slackware ... he really meant "the center of all forces"

there's literally tens of us!

I want a computer mouse with an air bearing.

@@justinjimenez3760 DOZENS kzfaq.info/get/bejne/orGZmJCnzLurlH0.html

@@justinjimenez3760 elevens now :D

@@eliotdayley518 Quantum computers will ship with them

If you don't mind me asking: What kind of magnetic media was it? I have a few older 15mb platters from a DEC mainframe computer, is that what you mean by rigid disk media?

pmk222 Yes, These were 14” platters. The discs were placed on the air bearing spindles, spun up to 3600 RPM and the flying write heads were loaded on the disc surface. A linear voice coil actuator would step and write a servo pattern. Depending on the the capacity, one to 7 platters were mounted into a cartridge for a single or a a “pack” with multiple platters. The capacity you mention sounds about right. This was in the mid-eighties where it was longitudinal recording with ferric oxide on aluminum substrates. Interesting side note: the “flying heads” used in all magnetic media also use the air bearing principle. Back in the 80s the flying heights were around 25 micro inches. Today’s heads can fly as low as 3 nano inches. Together with glass substrate, deposited magnetic films, better head and electronics makes rotating magnetic media a viable storage medium. Areal density has increased many orders if magnitude and are only recently starting to be replaced by SSD. Fun Fact: A removable 8 inch cartridge I worked on in 1987 would store 20MB of information or only 2 digital photographs in today’s typical application.

@@HarvardBob Out of curiosity, do you actually use micro and nano inches?

Anton Helsgaun Yes, micro inches was the unit of measurement used. When I was working in the mid-eighties they were transitioning to 5 1/4 inch drives because of the growing IBM PC market. The flying height of the heads is a major factor in increasing the areal density of the bird stored in bits/inch^2.

@@HarvardBob Did you use laser interferometers to measure the head position, or were very high resolution rotary encoders already available?

Me too. I also want to see a collab. ;-)

Hi cody

Maybe you make that video n maybe i'll watch it. Eh?☺

Wouldn’t work

Wouldn’t work silly XD @Cody’sLab

... and forwards.

I thought of this concept earlier this year but with a drone motor for thrust and some 11 year old madlad has already done it: kzfaq.info/get/bejne/fMuYpctes5OUaaM.html There is a commercial version too but apparently it's a bit sht

@@OliverUnderTheMoon What about using some chemical source for the gas? Sodium azide is the first thing that comes to my mind... But the weight of the puck would vary.

@@arthurwalraven1020 As would the gas output, it should be possible to balance the two.

@@Vaasref Sure. I was concerned with the mass variation because of the player's interaction with the puck, though. The speed wouldn't be consistent throughout the game.

Do you mean air cushions used for vibration isolation? Usually those are somewhat opposite to the air bearings -- an air bearing is usually desired to be very stiff to maintain the air gap exactly the same despite varying load (very high spring constant). Supports for vibration isolation are the opposite -- they allow movement of the support, but still provide the same force (very small spring constant).

@@cogoid Air bearing is by nature very shock isolating - any vibrations from the base are transferred to the air mass that then purges out thru the gap between base and load. If it was possible to use Schlieren imaging, you could see the vibrations as disturbances at the air outflow instead of being transferred to the load. Ofcourse with too high amplitude you can send the load to lunar orbit, but then vibrations are least of your worries...

@@sleeptyper Except the air gap is quite small. For a flat horizontal bearing, there would be excellent isolation in the horizontal plane and little isolation in the vertical plane.

@@whitcwa That is true when the air gap is completely flat, but some commercial bearing systems use grooves to increase the air mass. The more you have compressible fluid between your surfaces, the better dampening. A hovercraft is very good example of that.

Grooves don't increase the gap. Dampening for rigid air bearings is limited to the gap size. Hovercrafts use flexible skirts to keep the gap small.

some practical joker has put graphite in someones work shoes, by the end of his shift he had graphite all up to his neck

sounds great for the lungs :^0

I wouldn't think it's too bad or much worse than anything else we breath in daily. Our bodies get rid of most "debris" and chemicals pretty easily. It's the heavy metals that you have to be extremely careful with.

@@BIGWIGGLE223 Don't forget about needle-like stuff, around 10 micron long and 10:1 length to diameter. This is what causes silicosis. Graphite is no that though.

@noxxi knox en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coalworker%27s_pneumoconiosis

Correct, most air bearings at least used to have a single orifice and precisely lapped bearing surfaces the issue is that ok start up their was no path from the nozzle to the rest of the bearing surfaces, and if the bearing surfaces was cupped slightly to allow air flow across the entire surface it would cause a pistoning effect since air is compressible and the cupped bearing surfaces would act as compressible Chambers. Don't know if that makes sense but I'll link some images to better illustrate this. Graphite and other porous air and porous hydrostatic bearings avoid this problem by placing the "nozzles" across the entire surface and so don't require cupped surfaces or channels carved into the block and almost completely eliminate that bouncing effect. Porous vs orifice bearings images.app.goo.gl/etez3FPjPAiAqb4e8 Various styles of orifice bearings and pressure distribution compared to porous bearings. images.app.goo.gl/NCrUZvuSERCTHPVw6

It seems like using a noncompressible liquid would solve a lot of potential problems with air bearings. Water isn't compatible with most metals, but oil would work. But this is the basic principle used in journal bearings already. I wonder if pumping the oil through a channel as in air bearings would reduce the friction at all. I think at the very least it would reduce stiction.

@@ahobimo732 they already do that, both with orifice and porous media style of bearings, it's already used in more precision bearings and components than air bearings because of the rigidity and is often pressurized to much higher pressure levels (some go a couple thousand psi if I remember right). Pretty much every single surface grinder out there uses the oil version of air bearings.

@@lazyh-online4839 That's pretty neat! I did not know that. High precision industrial manufacturing (tool-making and the like) is wild stuff.

@@ahobimo732 it's called hydrostatic. The 4r-h spindle seems to be a popular spindle that uses that pressurized oil film, you can find a few videos of that spindle being tested here on KZfaq.

putting a finished print in an Acetone vapor chamber for a few also helps or painting acetone over the surface, but you need to be printing with PLA.

@@MrTrilbe ABS

This is gonna be dusty. VERY DUSTY

I think that the lack of friction in all directions would make it very difficult to actually go, as you push against the sides of ice skates. It would be amazing if you could go quickly though.

Or a graphite hockey table. Imagine how nice that would look.

*Applied Fancy Projects

That's why the urban myth about the cosmonauts using pencils while NASA spent millions on the space pen (Which they also didn't do) is wrong on all counts. Conductive dust floating into space shuttle electronics won't end well. Not really an issue with modern encapsulated PCBs though, but normal ball point pens and felt tip pens work perfectly in zero gravity, so no reason to develop any new tech at all for this.

@@peglor They did use pencils, but they were grease pencils.

It is interesting to watch Dan Gelbart's series of mechanical stuff related video, then I wonder why someone has the time and effect to work on this wonderful series. I looked up more about Dan. This gentleman founder an optics company which was later sold for a very large sum of money.

@@lpjunction Dan Gelbart had a very interesting career. He started as an electronic engineer, developed some very advanced and very successful communication equipment, then invented many other things -- educating himself along the way on how to do things like optical design, for example. And even though along the way he has created many companies, and is quite wealthy, he is still working with his hands in his basement machine shop -- where most of his products were created. He is also teaching at a college and that's why he has that video course on prototyping on KZfaq. He is sharing his experience as a contribution to the community. There are lots of things in his mini-lectures that even an experienced craftsman may find interesting -- but of course they are just short videos on a subject which one has to learn by doing things with one's own hands over quite a long time -- just like Dan did.

Dan Gelbart's video: kzfaq.info/get/bejne/qayiicegtM7ZYYU.html

Scraping is a super crude way to flatten something and yet it's insanely accurate, always crazy how precision machines are made.

@@origamihawk It's almost as if friction were a fundamental force

Just curious: how long does it take for the spindle to stop if a tool change is required?

@@cogoid The spindles are powered by a 3 phase AC system using variable frequency and variable voltage. From 180,000 RPM it takes about 6 seconds to come to a full stop. The shaft is held at 0 RPM by applying a small DC voltage to the AC spindle. Then, to ramp the spindle up, the DC is removed and the AC is applied. To reach max RPM, it takes about 6 seconds.

@@GregSr Cool! Thanks for explaining!

Would be really quick and the other hand can operate the vacuum cleaner for the dust, keeping the grooves / flutes clear.

I thought the same thing once I saw him using the ball as a tool.

@Neocaradina graphite conducts electricity. graphite dust can short-circuit power electric lines or power plant , that's why there's such thing in military as graphite bombs

@Neocaradina Graphite is conductive. You can make a really effective buck converter (a device that lowers voltage) out of a pencil. Just cut the graphite free of the pencil, attach your positive and negative leads to each end and place your power tap wire onto the graphite. If you place the tap halfway, you get half the voltage. It's a linear circuit so percentage of distance across is percentage of voltage you get out of the tap.

@@eideticex Not every device that lowers voltage is a buck converter. What you describe is a voltage divider, which wastes significant amounts of power. A buck converter is way more efficient.

Glad you warned him because *surely* he doesn't know that

@@eideticex That is a resistive divider... not a buck converter.

worst trackball ever. you don't want a trackball that's just constantly creeping along no matter how carefully you try to stop it or that rolls back to whichever side has a fraction of a milligram less grime on it.

​@@creepyloner1979 But wouldn't it be possible to adjust the amount of slipperiness by changing the amount of air provided?

@@Tomasitoke sure. You could control it with a trackball...

Tomasitoke and would you want a trackball that has to be hooked up to an air compressor?

​@@daos3300 In my shop I already have an air compressor running all the time, and a tiny hose is not a big deal for a stationary mouse. For home use you could probably use a fridge compressor which you can get for free, maybe even a couple of them if flow is insufficient

i was thinking the same thing. might get into the luxury granite air hockey table business. :P

idk, but mdf is probably too coarse to be smoothed like that

Very good point

In addition to being way smoother, the dust from graphite is partly graphen and graphite, which are both due to their cristalline structure great lubricants

The best 50 grand you never spent! ;-)

Hmmm...how about some air bearings on the bottom so you can just roll the mill around the shop? Would also look hilarious.

@@Ayestosea have you not been watching this video at all or what?

Well, if the bearing device consists of a single ball only, it is both ball bearing and bearing ball, isn't it? :)

They are a B.B. istn't they?

What about the hose?

same experience yesterday .................... what happened ?

kzfaq.info/get/bejne/orWEittnntPLmIE.html Same experience today! About 4 hours ago, I was mystified as to what the material they were using for air bearings & low & behold just now! Brilliant stuff...

I just heard of air bearings a few days ago... Now I know that KZfaq is recommending me videos based on what my subscriptions have sitting in their unpublished videos.

The same thing with me. The one I watched was an obvious manufacturers selling video. And then this is the very first thing to pop up in my feed. Coincidence?!?! I doubt it.

Air bearings are the new coolest thing

It's hinting that hovercars are the future...gotta have a way to get around once tptb nuke everything to glass.

Absolutely !!!! +1

That's a brilliant idea! any excuse to see that thing in action again i'm happy with.

Then how does he lubricate the bandsaw?

@@Llohr Graphite lubricant - badum tss!

After selecting a paint with strictly limited penetration? Would that be an issue, probably depends on how much the binder wicks into the surface.

@@scottwillis5434 That, sir, is an interesting animal once described by Eristhones: an ellifino.

they aren't really that fragile. you use them when you need super high precision with zero run out. semiconductor fabrication uses them as an example but there is also some videos on youtube i looked at earlier where someone made a diy lathe with hyper precise tolerance to make parts that seem like magic.

high speed, high heat aplications. Where oil cannot be and cintered bronze wont cut it, or mag lev is not feasible.

You could totally make a super efficient cardboard/foamboard cnc head with an air bearing like that.

I would think they'd be good for balancing props and other precision balance work like HS motor armatures.

Fast spinny things, i would use them for tiny air turbines.

That is a tube furnace for making carbon nanotubes (video not made yet. In fact, nanotubes not made yet :). Ironic that it is also covered in carbon dust from the current project.

@@AppliedScience can an aquarium air pump be used to supply air for small bearings? Like for M6 or M8 rods?

www.dictionary.com/browse/water--water-everywhere----nor-any-drop-to-drink

@@AppliedScience Thanks for taking the time to reply. I can't wait to see that video!

@@3er24t4g1 That would produce pulsed air which would ruin precision, use compressed air for a consistent air supply.

Ive done the math for a 2in dia rod, that's 130,000 rpm max so Im assuming if you are aiming for a particular rpm you should aim for a particular size for the rotational assembly you plan on floating. I can pass on the formula or figure out what dia you need if you reply as I know youtube doesn't always give notifications for comments.

@@Ayestosea Awesome, II would love to know the formula, thanks that would be great :) , i am going to use max 1 inch, probably something like 12 mm (about 1/2 inch)

@@KeesHessels Seems I might not be entirely correct. But I would still design it so any surface with airflow doesnt go supersonic. I dont exactly understand it 100% like if the film thickness is thin and the air "roll" does that allow for doubling to 260,000 rpm without going supersonic or if the rolling itself is limited by the air density blah blah

Erosion by air is a thing, but I've only heard it seriously discussed in a time frame of milions of years. Same with the claim that it is frictionless, it isn't but air friction (diffrent from air resistance) is only relevant at very high velocities.

I was think the same thing.

me stupid dont got it

yes, an old professor of mine invented (and patented) a "hydrostatic leadscrew" back in the '80's: patents.google.com/patent/US5090265A/en

Weird coincidence, the patent expired today (or maybe I don't know how to read a patent properly - quite likely).

@@FilterYT I think it would have been about 10 years ago.

Yeah. Just chuck a handful of the stuff into the air at a music studio and the horrible sounds that start glitching their way into a repeated stream of bass "clicks" is ready for the club. Making EDM is really easy when you discover hacks like this. Possibly add a sample of someone saying something cool and you're all set.

All 3 of you

1/2 a person

Too small

Granite surface plates are expensive if you buy them new, but if you find one at an equipment auction from a machine shop that's going out of business, they seem to sell for anything between $20 and $100. You can sometimes get even larger table-sized ones for even cheaper but that's because they're really heavy and hard to move.

Air hockey!

If you have an item that you need to re-position on a smooth surface that you don't want to mar (such as the granite or glass slab), putting it on air bearings would let you move it around. Putting suction cups on it that you can then use to hold it in place when you're done moving it would be a nice touch.

Would it be practical to use these bearings for a large flywheel to store electricity instead of using batteries? ie: to use a motor to add angular momentum and when you want to draw energy from it to use a generator to subtract angular momentum from it

Yeah, we know they're out there. No need to mention them by name. They know who they are. 😉

Wait, people are selling nuclear waste on Amazon? How did they even get their hands on this stuff? Shouldn't it be buried deep under a mountain or something?

This type of graphite is very clean and can only be sold under controlled conditions, some rogue states like to buy it, at sky high prices!

@@unvergebeneid graphite isn't exactly radioactive waste on the same levels a s things you would think of such as yellowcake or glass matrix wastes; things capable of causing real immediate harm While the graphite might be at or around the safety levels for salable bulk raw materials, you probably don't want to be working it and inhaling itsnincredibly fine dust. ALL THAT BEING SAID - radioactive "safety dose" limits are set with an absurd margin of safety- you could probably take ten times the dose (of most types) through your skin the daily max limit, every day for a year, and be completely fine and unaware anything had even taken place. Interestingly also - if you can find a cheap Geige counter, modern cheap *crap metal* items like.knives and forks are.sometime mildly radioactive. So while having a block of graphite around your house your whole life is likely 99.99999% safe, I wouldn't want a few trillion of those same radioactive.mulecules buried deep in my lungs from not wearing a proper dust mask/using filtration Edit.: sorry about the typing errors; I'm on mobile

@@garethjones6342 Sure, it's not the same as highly radioactive materials but even medical equipment like gloves and stuff that's used with radioactive isotopes is considered nuclear waste and has to go into terminal storage. It's actually the main source of radioactive waste.

@@unvergebeneid if that is now the case, then great. When I first started working as a glassblower 20 years ago (we use carbon for all sorts of molds and tooling) it was common practice to only buy from certified sellers. Or at the very least avoid buying from small portions sellers from places.like eastern Europe. People in the glassblowing community did tests with geiger counters (or maybe cloud chambers?) And found neutron activated graphite. It would only be dangerous if machines and inhaled... but that's how.you make molds and tools from the stuff. If regulations and sales practices.have changed, I'm glad for it. One less thing to worry about!

In a properly constructed air bearing they will create the air pad without needing any pressurized air source

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I saw that recommendations but I did not bother chatting her up 🤦🤦🤦

who is this professional broker and how would I be able to get in contact with her

me neither "1 view"

11 seconds

@@Mysli0210 - Be aware that those early counts aren't accurate. I've seen it many times with "0 (zero) views" yet 100+ thumbs up/down and with many comments.

@@ElmerFuddGun yeah figured as much, seeing other commentors

@@ElmerFuddGun I don't expect it to be accurate, I just found out fun to get that low just by chance.