During my ten years at igus®, I’ve encountered a number of customers who wanted to use our drylin® linear bearings for manual applications, but sometimes due to heavy loads or the configuration of the drive force our bearings were not the best choice. That is, until we created the drylin® WJRM Hybrid system.

drylin® WJRM - a cost-effective linear bearing that both rolls and slides - was designed with the goal of (1) reducing bearing friction; (2) lowering the drive force; and (3) allowing the customer to drive the system without being constrained by the ‘2-to-1 Rule’.

For example: you have a 100-pound door you want to move manually using a sliding linear bearing. The minimum drive to move this door would be about 25 pounds using a typical sliding bearing (with an estimated static COF of 0.20-0.25 and minor misalignment), but this weight is not really the ideal force for an operator to move day-in and day-out. Our new Hybrid bearing reduces this COF to 0.05.

For an application that is either hand-powered or automated at low cycles, the same scenario is true even if you’re not within the 2-to-1 ratio. By using the drylin® WJRM, you can extend the ratio by 5 times to make it a 5-to-10 ratio.