How to get the balls back in a ballnut?

[Jonathan]

If you make a ball insertion tool it's easy

Could've told me that an hour ago, :



Actually it wasn't so bad with the big magnet, but if you don't have a suitable magnet then your way is a lot cheaper. It's a double start nut, so having 6 return tubes made it more difficult for the magnet to retain the balls, however they were sufficiently well held for me to be able to pour oil through the nut to clean it before putting back on the screw.

Earlier today I was removing the other nut from this ballscrew, holding it vertically and meanwhile the other nut decided to start spinning due to gravity and drop on the floor, so then I spent a while scrabbling around with the magnet finding the 51 balls. You can work out the number of balls per track, or at least get a reasonable idea, by simply measuring the pitch diameter and using that to find the circumference (accounting for the fact it's helical) and dividing by the measured diameter of one ball, i.e. ((pi*16.803)^2+10^2)^0.5/3.167=17 for this nut.

Shinowbian: I've got a spare RM1605 nut, so if you need one sooner than Chai can deliver then we can do a swap so long as you have all the balls.