Sunday, November 21, 2010  Know How: Ball Bearings  One of my
favorite science fiction books when I was a kid was Jules
Verne’s The Mysterious Island. It’s been a few decades, but I
seem to recall a party of intrepid adventurers being stranded on
a volcanic island, where they managed to reconstruct modern
(1860) technology more or less from scratch. There are a few
reasons why this wouldn’t work, starting with the fact that
volcanic islands don’t have iron ore, but the problem is still
interesting. The modern world is utterly dependent on thousands
or millions of technological devices, so I thought I might start
finding out how a few of them were made.  One pretty important
invention that we probably don’t think much about is the roller
bearing, but it plays a critical role in all sorts of machinery.
Marble players and others have long admired the shiny and
seemingly perfect spherical roller bearing. So how do you make
one?  If you have played with wax or clay, you probably have a
clue. If you roll that piece