I fixed my dad's angle grinder with a ball bearing I salvaged from my gerbil's old excercise wheel a few years back.
I fixed my dad's angle grinder with a ball bearing I salvaged from my gerbil's old excercise wheel a few years back.
It was even the same brand. I love when hoarding materials pays off.
6201RS
- 6 - type code: single-row, deep groove ball bearing
- 2 - series / robustness: (2 corresponds with 'light', which is more durable than 0, but less durable than 3 or 4)
- 01 - size code: 12mm bore (inner diameter)
- RS - grease seal: rubber seal one side (no seal would be '6201', both sides sealed would be '6201-2RS'. Z and ZZ are used similarly to indicate presence of steel shield(s))
The 6201 is a good fit for this application, and providing the gerbil wasn't too hard on it, should last a long time.
This guy bearing.
I recently took apart my weed whacker and it used the same ball bearing. I actually learned that these ball bearing casings (?) are super common. I replaced mine with a skate board bearing and it's as good as new.
So what do we think folks? Underbuilt angle grinder or overbuilt gerbil wheel?
Its a mass produced bearing type. Most likely the cheapest option for both devices. Optimizing a bearing for a gerbil wheel seems like the real overengineering in my opinion.
This is one of the counter intuitive things about production at scale. I remember I added factory cruise control to a Mazda 3 by buying the steering wheel with the buttons and having a technician flip a switch in the ECU. Everything else was already there.
They never made any additional changes to non equipped cara because it's cheaper to just produce 1 part or 1 configuration and digitally lock it out. 2500$ option with a 200$ fix.
Thing is, when I had gerbils, their exercise wheel turned on a cylinder of plastic inside another cylinder of plastic. I also had one that was a wire wheel with sheet metal spokes and a wire base, the "bearings" were the wires of the base poked into holes in the spokes. A gerbil wheel having a ball bearing at all seems a little bit extra to me.
Not all bearings are created equal. This might last for years. This also might explode into fast-moving metal shards in a day. It shouldn't be a big problem if it does, as an angle grinder should be built to contain exploding bearings, but it might be worth ordering a higher-spec bearing to have on hand before you need it in a hurry.
Those look like skateboard bearings to me, they are quite common. A relatively high quality set of 8 bearings is like 15 bucks if you have a skateshop nearby
Reds. Look for Bones Reds.
That's either a very over-engineered hamster wheel, or that grinder was under spec'd.
Yeah, it's a Ryobi grinder and the excercise wheel was quite high quality one.
Yep, pretty sure there's some overlap in that, lol.
That's a balls-y move.
They don’t make gerbil exercise wheels like they used to.
That's dope man!
What happened to your gerbil, op?
Your answer will be highly scrutinized.
Something involving angle grinders.
o7 He was the bravest little cosmonaut trainee
They used the old one as a toilet and it made the entire terrarium smell like piss
OP flushed him but that plugged the pipes so he had to use a drum auger clear the blockage.
Safely stored in rectum