Best Practices for Selecting and Sizing Guide Wheels for your Linear Motion Needs

For over 30 years, Bishop-Wisecarver Corporation (BWC) has been developing best practices for matching guide wheel linear motion properties to customer requirements, based on engineering and empirical experience. By sharing knowledge and experience, selecting a guide wheel with the properties best-suited for a given linear motion application should be much easier and result in a system that reduces design costs and engineering change orders, as well as lower warranty, assembly, installation and mounting costs. While much attention has been focused on the precision and speed of other linear motion guides, guide wheel systems have their niche too. Guide wheel systems routinely operate in environments with high humidity, high concentrations of liquid and solid particulates, operating temperatures up to 500°F (autoclavable), noise level limitations, very long travels, and meet tolerances as high as +/- 0.001" (+/- 0.03mm). Compared to other linear motion systems, guide wheels have less friction, are much faster to assemble and very cost efficient.