3D Printing Ball Bearings

Youtube member Loczster asked for a ball bearing demonstration. Can the MakerBot Replicator 3D printer print working ball bearings? The short answer? Yes! In this video I selected 3 bearing designs and share my printing experience.
The bearings were a challenge to print, and I had about a 50% failure rate. The main difficulty is in printing the balls. Ideally each would have a small spindle of support to attach it to the heated build platform. In reality it needs quite a bit of plastic to help it stay in place during printing, which in turn leads to quite a bit of detailed hand work to clean up each bearing. The bearings do not spin right out of the printer, each of the models in this video required various amounts of time to clean them up. The largest of the three required at least an hour of careful work to remove all of the excess plastic while keeping the balls as round and smooth as possible.
Here are links to the model files shown in the video:
1 - Bearing
Infill: 10%
Layer Height: .2mm
# Shells: 1
Feed Rate: 48mm/sec
Travel Feedrate: 90mm/sec
Extruder Temperature: 235C
Build Platform Temperature: 110C
Raft and Support (External) Enabled
2 - Ball Bearing
Infill: 10%
Layer Height: .2mm
# Shells: 1
Feed Rate: 48mm/sec
Travel Feedrate: 90mm/sec
Extruder Temperature: 235C
Build Platform Temperature: 110C
3 - Bearing for Filament Spindle
Infill: 20%
Layer Height: .2mm
# Shells: 1
Feed Rate: 48mm/sec
Travel Feedrate: 90mm/sec
Extruder Temperature: 235C
Build Platform Temperature: 110C
Raft and Support (External) Enabled
Material: MakerBot 1.75mm ABS Natural
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