Spinning Cylinders

[Rick TYler]

Commercial conveyor rollers are either heavy, expensive or both. I have a strong preference for light, cheap and simple, so I have made a variety of cylinders during prototyping. We do not have a machine shop, so I have been trying different ways of attaching a roller to a shaft with other ideas.

We have:

1. Made a wooden cylinder, pinned to a 1/2-inch shaft by drilling holes through the wood into the shaft. This worked well, but was heavy.

2. Used a hollow shaft with friction-fit plugs in the ends (didn't work so well).

3. Inserted threaded fasteners into plugs fit into the ends of a hollow aluminum cylinder (we unscrewed one of them which should have had reversed threads but didn't).

4. Created a free-spinning cylinder pegged to the shaft by an external metal fitting fixed to the shaft with a set screw (this worked well, but took up a lot of shaft room).

I'm just interested in hearing how other teams without the ability to cut keyways dealt with this, and how you engineered lightweight, Poof ball-friendly rollers.