Gear Cutters

[Mike N]

I bought several sets of gear cutters from MSC

http://www1.mscdirect.com/eCommerce...m_re=Category-_-BodyLink-_-Gear+Tooth+Cutters

Made my own arbor!

 

[tel]

(the arbor cost $123.00)

OUCH!!!!! Now I know why I make mine!

 

[chuck foster]

hope they serve you well brian, but you sure could buy allot of ready made gears from boston gear and a few other places.

so what is the next project for you??

chuck

 

[doc1955]

I'll bet something with lots of gears!! :big: :big: :big:

 

[tel]

hope they serve you well brian, but you sure could buy allot of ready made gears from boston gear and a few other places.

so what is the next project for you??

chuck

Not here you couldn't - for some reason gears are very expensive here, only real options are making or scrounging.

His next project should be the Harold Hall dividing head, or something similar - there are just too many pitfalls trying to cut gears with a rotary table!

 

[John S]

If you get a chance, watch a DVD called 'Making gears the easy way'

http://littlemachineshop.com/products/product_view.php?ProductID=2057

It is boring as hell with his monotone voice for four hours, expect to fall asleep a couple of times, and he makes some glaring mistakes, but he does show very easy methods to make all your own tooling and how to use it in such a way to produce gears that work. They might not be absolutely spot on, but they will work just fine.


John

Very rare that I disagree with John, I respect his ways views and ways of working too much but the video he links to is terrible.

It's blurred, too dark and when he zooms in to show a gear the teeth are that out of focus that they could be any form.

All his calculations are incorrect, since when has Pi been 3.4146 ?

Need some decent instruction? Go onto Youtube and look for a series of video's by a guy on there called Hobbynut.

He's got two series on there, one on gear cutting and one on hobbing plus a few odd ones.

Here's the link to his first one.

[ame]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MItgd-faHFw[/ame] well worth the time and they are free.

John S.

 

[Brian Rupnow]

Chuck Foster--I realy don't know how to answer your post. I know that I probably won't live long enough to buy $500 worth of gears----But---I wanted to buy something for my little machine shop, and something to further my education regarding machining. The money is irrelevent. Thats less than two days design time for me. As I mentioned earlier, I was called in to consult on a project 3 months ago for 3 weeks, and now I'm still there after 12, so this is basically "found money". What will I build next?--I don't know. In the last 5 months I've built the Overcrank single, the Popcorn engine, the Krazyklockwork mechanism, and the Jacobs ladder, so I'm kind of burned out on machining at present. Probably, as someone says, whatever I build will have lots of gears in it. ;D ;D ;D---Brian

 

[tel]

;D You'll either love or hate gear cutting Brian, like keeping pigs, there is no middle road!

 

[Maryak]

there are just too many pitfalls trying to cut gears with a rotary table!

By this, I assume you mean a rotary table without a dividing plate setup. ???

With dividing plates it's no different than a dividing head in terms of carving up a circle.

Best Regards
Bob

 

[cfellows]

;D You'll either love or hate gear cutting Brian, like keeping pigs, there is no middle road!

I'm one of the haters... I love gears and machines that have gears, the more the better, but I don't like making them. Too stressful. I always worry that I'll miss a hole in the dividing plate or that I've miscalculated which row of holes to use. I still have to go through a process of head scratching to figure out which row of holes to use on my dividing head to get the desired number of divisions. From day 1, it seemed like the correct process is backward. Also, the process is tedious. It's too easy for the mind to wander when you are doing something that repetitive.

It's always a relief when I'm done and I always (usually always) love the results. But I never know until the last tooth whether everything has been done right. Having said all that, I would rather make gears than buy them. They are expensive and the choice of hub sizes, face width, and center holes are all too limited.

Chuck

 

[tel]

By this, I assume you mean a rotary table without a dividing plate setup. ???

With dividing plates it's no different than a dividing head in terms of carving up a circle.

Best Regards
Bob

Yes Bob, that is indeed what I meant! Fitted with dividing plates it becomes, in essence, a dividing head.

 

[Blogwitch]

John,

It's blurred, too dark and when he zooms in to show a gear the teeth are that out of focus that they could be any form.

I don't know which version you were looking at, but mine is perfect to watch.

I had already pre warned about the 'glaring mistakes', but I am looking at processes, of which he shows almost everything you can use to make gears that work, by manual means.
The calculations are easy enough to do yourself, in fact, most of them are done for you if you get hold of one of the many engineers handbooks. I use one from my hardback library from about 1920, and it shows me every size size of blank and depth of cut that I need up to a certain tooth count, plus all the easy calcs I need for everything else.

He shows about every easy way to make gears, especially the spiral flute hobs, which match my commercial hobs for operation, whereas the one you sent us to watch?

I downloaded every one of those youtube vids you pointed us to, just to put them into semblance of order, and he basically only shows the straight hob method, nothing else.
Plus, I think the last to one vid then shows 'Here is a program I wrote/got/stole to do all the calculations for my CNC machine to cut the gears with the hob I have just made' ?

OK if you are running a CNC mill, but if not, then not one bit of use to me at all.

Basically it showed me absolutely nothing that I had not already picked up from the DVD I mentioned.

Sorry John, we'll have to agree to disagree.


John

Too many Johns about here.

 

[Brian Rupnow]

What does the arbor for these gear cutters look like? I have ordered the $123.00 version along with the gear cutters, but it is only available in a straight shank, 3/4" diameter. I am going to be forced with having to A--find out if I can cut this shtraight shank down using a carbide to 0.5" diameter to fit one of my MT2 collets, or B--Make a new arbor with a 1/2" shank to match the business end of the one I've ordered.---Brian

 

[doc1955]

Here is a pic of the end of one I made the little pin pressed in is the driver fits in the slot in cutter. Not much to them.

 

[Brian Rupnow]

Thanks Doc. It will be nice if I can turn down the shank of the one I have on order.

 

[maury]

Brian, I take it your machine has an MT2 spindle. If you have to make an arbor, something found that works quite well is to use an MT to JT adapter. I use these all the time for making gear blanks on my lathe. You can turn down the JT part of the adapter with a carbide tool. The adapters are fairly hard at the skin, but get softer inside. Get an adapter with the largest JT taper you can and go from there. In the case of using the adapter for a gear cutter, you may have to press on a piece of steel and machine it to get a larger diameter, don't know if JT adapters come large enough to hold a gear cutter. I have not had any problems drilling and threading the ends with HSS tools. Good luck.

maury

 

[Brian Rupnow]

I ran across this website tonight, which will create FREE in either 2d or 3D cad a spur gear where you can input the diametral pitch, number of teeth, etcetera, and it will create a dimensionally correct drawing or model for you. Wish I had found this a week ago-----It really works great.
http://www.rushgears.com/Tech_Tools/PartSearch7/partSearch.php?gearType=SPUR

 

[doc1955]

Brain I use that website a lot I believe I did post it in the thread that I have going now. I could model them up myself but I've gotten lazy in my old age :big: That is how I get the dimensions I need to create my single point tools. Just grab the geometry off the gear put it into a drawing and apply some dimensions. Anyway I believe we have ordered gears from them where I do real work :big:
It is a handy site for sure.

 

[Brian Rupnow]

I have no desire to begin a new project at the moment, but I thought this might be a good time to tune up my divider plates. Way back when I bought my BusyBee mill, I also purchased a "YIYEN" rotary table made by the "Tzu Yen Industrial Comapany Ltd." in Taiwan. I also purchased a set of indexing plates to use with it, and apparently they were made in India. Two years ago, on my first attempt to make a set of gears, I discovered to my horror that the 3 holes on the divider plates which were supposed to bolt to the rotary table were not even remotely close to being in the correct position. However, fortunately, the center hole did fit the shaft on the rotary table, and fit quite well. I modified the one divider plate that I needed, shook my head, and shoved the rest into a tin box, possibly to never again see the light of day!!! Now that I have bit the bullet and ordered a set of gear cutters, I thought it would be time well spent to modify the other two divider plates to make them fit. This is not the worlds best photograph, but if you take a look at the 3 bolt holes around the center hole on each divider plate, you will see that I had to "move" every one of them, some as much as by half a hole. They all fit now, and there is no moral to this story, other than that old trite but true "You get what you pay for!!!"

 

[Blogwitch]

Be careful Brian, even with all those holes, there will be some numbers you will not be able to index to. There should have been a chart with them to tell you what is available to you with those plates, and how to get them.

A lot of people think that having those plates will give you all numbers. Nothing is ever that simple, prime numbers are usually the ones unobtainable.

I have 7 plates for mine, gathered over the years, with all sorts of hole patterns in them, and those allow me to get almost any number I require, but some still eluded me.

Now I have Division Master on my RT, that will give any number up to 9999.


John