Product category:
Gears, brakes, couplings and engines
News Release from: Reliance Precision Mechatronics | Subject: Reliance Round Rack
Edited by the Engineeringtalk Editorial
Team on 02 August 2001
Special stainless shaft for low cost A3
scanner
Reliance Round Rack, a precision, stainless steel linear shaft with helicoidal rack teeth, proved ideal for engineers at Fujifilm Electronic Imaging who were developing an A3 low cost scanner
When engineers at Fujifilm Electronic Imaging were developing an A3 low cost scanner they had three specific design requirements The drive for the scanner and focus mechanisms had to offer excellent repeatability, without jitter, in a very compact space envelope
This article was originally published on Engineeringtalk on 10 Oct 2000 at 8.00am (UK)
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Fujifilm Electronic Imaging engineers had achieved success on previous scanner designs using a linear actuation system comprising a high precision rack and a separate linear ball track, but space was so constrained in the new scanner that this option was no longer open to them.
Engineers at Reliance had no hesitation in recommending a suitable alternative solution.
A component which not only took care of both the bearing and actuation functions in one fell swoop, but also, because of its unusual design, one which could accommodate slight misalignments in the system with no loss of image quality.
This unusual component is Reliance Round Rack, a precision, stainless steel linear shaft with helicoidal rack teeth.
It is the special design of the helicoidal teeth which means that, unlike normal straight tooth rack, Reliance Round Rack is compliant to slight variations in alignment with the mating pinion without loss of accuracy or performance.
Reliance supplied three samples which immediately established proof of principle.
Further developments through the prototype and pre-production stages were highly successful and gave Fujifilm Electronic Imaging Engineers the results they had been looking for.
A double success was scored when the resulting system was not only more compact, but also more economical, because one component was now taking care of both the load bearing and actuation functions on each of the two axes.
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