Gear making software recommendations?

[kristenanne77]

For Gearmaking, I came across these two on the web: gearotic and gearify.
It looks as if Gearotic does round gears and Gearify does "shaped" gears (other than round). Has anyone used these programs or some other gear making program.

I also would be interested to see how to build the gears mysef with a cad program, if it isn't too time consuming.. Currently i have Inkscape and QCad, both are freeware, and also CUT2D which is commercial but has limited cad capability.

Thanks
K

[WillAdams]

We've a section for them on the wiki:

http://www.shapeoko.com/wiki/index.php/CAM#Gears

(but it's hard to find --- considered putting it under CAD, but some of the programs go directly to cutting files.... added a note on this there.)

Drawing them yourself is pretty straightforward, just have to get the teeth shaped properly so that they mesh. Easiest thing to do is to:

- determine the proper size for a tooth (it will need to be an integral of the diameter of the gear)
- draw a complete tooth, both positive (top) and negative (bottom)
- position a pair of them top (addendum) and bottom (deddendum plus clearance) along the circumference of the circle which will become the gear
- power duplicate the pair, rotating the proper number of degrees to match the desired number of teeth
- select every part which will be an addendum and add it to the circle
- repeat for the remaining parts, but subtract them

I know that would be trivial in Freehand, and I'd be able to manage it in Illustrator --- I'd hope it would be possible in Inkscape or QCad

[DanMc]

I've been using http://hessmer.org/gears/InvoluteSpurGearBuilder.html which was recommended in the Guerrilla Guide to CNC Machining and I find it works really well.

There is also a page on there for drawing your own gears - Practical part geometries, which has a really great explanation of the geometry of gears as well as practical information about designing them to work properly.

CamBam also has a gear widget which I have used and works pretty well although I find the ones from Hessmer's program to have nicer geometry

[cvoinescu]

Will, how do you draw the involute shape? Or you just eyeball it?

[WillAdams]

I usually draw 3 paths in a row, then add nodes, shift them around and subtract one from the other until I have a reasonable shape which snaps together, but looks to have reasonable clearance and then split two of them in half, align them, then union them.

Yeah, I guess I eyeball it.

[Auarhau]

http://woodgears.ca/gear_cutting/template.html
http://woodgears.ca/gear/index.html