Gear software

I recently asked for information on types of wood suitable for making gears and had a very generous and helpful response. May I now take this a step further and ask whether anyone knows of software into which one can input gear data ie pcd, number of teeth and module and obtain a two dimensional printout of the gear. This is for my son who needs to make wooden gears for a project. His hope is to glue a paper image of the gear onto suitable wood and cut around it.

Mick

If he has an iOS device, and is happy with Involute gears ...

Easy Gear is probably all he needs: **LINK**

https://apps.apple.com/gb/app/easy-gear/id1197863906

MichaelG.

Edited By Michael Gilligan on 19/06/2020 08:16:51

Quite a few if you dig around:

Online, via a browser **LINK**

Software:

Specifically for wooden gears

GearDXF is popular, and I think I've used it under wine on Linux.

There's a gear drawing tool in Inkscape. (Slight learning curve, it's part of a much larger vector drawing package.)

Not tried it, an add-on for QCAD : **LINK**

I usually use the gear tool in FreeCAD, I think there's one in Fusion360 too, and likely in other CAD packages. But getting into general purpose CAD tools just to draw a few gears is hard work!

Dave

Asuming external or spur gears, it is surprisingly easy to draw involute gears using a basic CAD package - as long as you are familiar with all the CAD packages commands. Ivan Law's book in the Workshop Practice Series shows how to draw the teeth using an acceptable shortcut. The general idea is to draw one tooth, and then copy it however many times around the circle.

If you have access to it, MEW290 includes an article from me which goes into this.

I must admit that initially it does seem daunting, but then once one is done, it becomes a lot easier.

Peter G. Shaw

Thank you gents. Just what he needs.

Mick

Perhaps cut a base circle from plywood, plus a length of string and a pencil, which would provide a suitably accurate involute for this project. Or even get the long-unused compass set and protractor out, and draw it.

Bill

To show it's not too tedious to draw the curve, here's part of a scan of an A3 drawing I made a few weeks ago to give me some idea of the error between a circular arc and an involute, so I haven't actually drawn the involute, just tested various radii to detemine the fit. It's not very clear because the pencil drawing was quite light; I've attempted to increase the contrast. The scan is in my album.

Bill

8mm Foamex PVC gears cut on small CNC router using the Wooden Gears software, this is a prototype final version will probably be Perspex, Its for controlling a water valve using a Arduino Uno and a L298 motor driver, Another of my crazy projects!

All good suggestions. Could I add one more thing please?

If he is to go the 'print out' route, try to print a line of a known dimension on the same sheet then check it with a ruler. If you calculate the gear diameter beforehand, you can even use the printout itself.

Some printers have issues with scaling and especially if printing something near to the size of the sheet of paper can do unexpected things. You need to check in both X- and Y-directions until you are confident that printing something 100mm dia. actually comes out on the paper as 10mm diameter.

.

An excellent point

... and, if I might add, nicely addressed by options in Easy Gear

MichaelG.