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Self-aligning rails for controlling misalignments in linear movement systems

Misalignments result in additional costs for manufacturers and users of industrial machinery.

Linear rails are used in almost all paired applications.  If the surfaces they are installed on are not rigid, perfectly flat or if the rails are not perfectly parallel to each other or vertically aligned, the sliders inside the rails work under stress. This causes overloads that have a negative impact on the system's performance and service life.  This also translates into additional costs for the manufacturers and users of industrial machines, who are forced to replace rails that wear out before their time. 

It is however very common to come across industrial machines with irregular surfaces. Installing an excessively rigid system under these circumstances would be very costly and time consuming, also running the risk of not being successful in effectively controlling the misalignment.  Rollon has found a way of addressing this problem by creating the Compact Rail, a rail with intrinsic and highly effective self-alignment properties. The bearings in the sliders move over rails with different cross sections (U, K, T).  Which, when combined, absorb the misalignments in the installation surface by providing sliding elements with enough freedom of movement to find the correct parallelisms with respect to the surfaces themselves.  In essence, the trajectories of the bearings in a Compact Rail have tolerance margins that make the product ideal for use on irregular or misaligned surfaces.  The size of a Compact Rail (43 mm) is able to absorb parallelism errors of up to 3.9 mm between the rails and errors of up to 2° in terms of vertical alignment: an excellent result!