It can be understood as a kind of rolling guidance, which is made by the steel ball rolling between the slider and the guide rail infinitely, so that the load platform moves along the guide rail easily with high precision and linearity, and reduces the friction coefficient to one fiftieth of the normal traditional sliding guidance, which can easily achieve high positioning accuracy. The final unit design between slider and guide rail makes the linear guide rail bear the load of up, down, left, right and other directions at the same time. The patented return system and refined and simplified structure design make the linear guide rail of HIWIN move more smoothly and with low noise.

Slider - changes the motion from a curve to a straight line. The new guide rail system enables the machine tool to obtain rapid feed speed. Under the condition of the same spindle speed, rapid feed is the feature of linear guide rail. Like the plane guide, the linear guide has two basic elements: one is the fixed element as the guide, the other is the moving element. As the linear guide rail is a standard part, for the machine tool manufacturer, all that needs to be done is to process a plane for installing the guide rail and adjust the parallelism of the guide rail. Of course, in order to ensure the accuracy of the machine tool, a small amount of scraping and grinding of the bed or column is essential, and in most cases, the installation is relatively simple. The guide rail as a guide is made of hardened steel, which is placed on the installation plane after finishing grinding. Compared with the plane guide rail, the geometry of the cross section of the linear guide rail is more complex than that of the plane guide rail. The reason for the complexity is that the guide rail needs to be processed with grooves to facilitate the movement of the sliding elements. The shape and number of grooves depend on the functions to be completed by the machine tool. For example, a guideway system that not only bears the linear force, but also the overturning moment is quite different from the guideway system that only bears the linear force.

The basic function of the fixed element (guide rail) of the linear guide rail system is like the bearing ring, and the bracket for installing the steel ball is in the shape of "V". The bracket covers the top and both sides of the guide rail. In order to support the working parts of the machine tool, a set of linear guide rails has at least four supports. For supporting large working parts, the number of supports can be more than four.

When the working parts of the machine tool move, the steel ball circulates in the bracket groove, distributing the wear of the bracket to each steel ball, thus prolonging the service life of the linear guide rail. In order to eliminate the gap between the bracket and the guide rail, preloading can improve the stability of the guide rail system. The preloading is to install oversized steel balls between the guide rail and the bracket. The diameter tolerance of the steel ball is ± 20 μ m, with 0.5 μ m as the increment, the steel ball is screened and classified, and installed on the guide rail respectively. The preload depends on the force acting on the steel ball. If the force acting on the steel ball is too large and the preloading time is too long, which results in the increase of the resistance of the bracket movement, the problem of balance action will appear; in order to improve the sensitivity of the system and reduce the resistance of the movement, the preloading should be reduced correspondingly, and in order to improve the accuracy and the retention of the movement, sufficient preloading negative numbers are required, which are two contradictory aspects.

When the working time is too long, the ball begins to wear, and the preload on the ball begins to weaken, which leads to the decrease of the movement accuracy of the working parts of the machine tool. If you want to maintain the initial accuracy, you must replace the rail bracket or even the rail. If the rail system has been preloaded. The system accuracy has been lost by replacing the rolling elements.

The design of the guide rail system aims to maximize the contact area between the fixed elements and the moving elements, which can not only improve the bearing capacity of the system, but also bear the impact force generated by intermittent cutting or gravity cutting, spread the force widely and expand the bearing area. In order to achieve this, there are many kinds of groove shapes in the guide rail system, and there are two representative ones, one is called Gothic (pointed arch), the shape is the extension of semicircle, the contact point is the vertex, the other is circular arc, which can also play the same role. No matter which structure of the clamp, there is only one purpose, and more rolling steel ball radius is required to contact with the guide rail (fixed element). The key to the problem is how the rolling element contacts the guide rail.