Swerve Module Mounting Bearing

[Brandon Holley]

I will post pictures of the swerve module I designed as part of my senior design project at Northeastern when I get them off my other hard drive...however here are my thoughts until then...

The silverthin bearings are a really nice solution, however they do have some issues, and they are ridiculously expensive (on order of ~$78 a piece)

I used the most simple/cost effective solution I could and figured I would start adding complexity and price as needed. My approach was to start from the ground up and see what was the simplest solution I could use.

I ended up taking a stock bronze bushing from mcmaster and bore-ing it out, and parting several smaller bushings from it. I pressed these into the plates that mounted the module to frame. Because I turned the bushings myself I was able to get a very precise fit on all of them. This resulted in a perfectly workable solution.

Had that not worked as expected, my plan of attack was to do a large sleeve like Adam described, and then use thrust bearings (w/ ball bearings) to alleviate the thrust load.


My swerve can be seen in action here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mlla1xahkrk

pics to follow...