Hi Kirk, >>>>>>>>>>>>Has anyone tried cutting gears with something similar to this arrangement? >>>>>>>>>
I tried to get my head round this method of gear cutting a while ago and gave up several times with a severe headache. It must be possible but it would have to be done in a number of increments unless the gear was very thin. I need to be able to cut gears with a cycloidal form and so most gears would have parallel flanks to the teeth with ogival tips. So, I was looking at centring the cutter in Z, moving it up to the right position to cut the flank of one tooth and ploughing it in to the tooth depth in Y. Then remove it to the start position of the ogive and then have a line of code rotating A clockwise and Z down simultaneously to end at the tooth tip position. This should give an ogival curve I think. The blank would then have to go back to the position just before the cutter is first fed in in Z, Y and A, index one tooth on and repeat the whole thing. When that is all done for the whole wheel, it would be necessary to start cutting the other flank of each tooth in the same way but rotating the A-axis anticlockwise. Having done that, X would need incrementing and the whole thing repeating again and again until the whole gear thickness was cut. For my purposes - tiny watch wheels, I could easily cut the wheel in one pass using a thin slitting saw and cutting on the sides of the teeth as I would only be cutting brass and, in any case, there should only be a very small area of contact. However, I got totally flummoxed trying to work out multi-nested routines and gave up until a dark winters night!! :-( What would be even more useful to me would be the ability to cut steel pinions this way as making them now is the bane of my life ( I'm just trying to sort out how to cut one with 5 leaves and an overall diameter of just 1.3mm ) ... I can work out the geometry OK but I don't seem to be able to convert it into working G-code... An alternative method of cutting might be to cut each tooth by cutting along the X axis and then incrementing the work in Y and Z and repeating like this in tiny sections until the whole thing is cut. The disadvantage here though is that the teeth will not have a smooth profile which could lead to unwanted friction. -- Best wishes, Ian ____________ Ian W. Wright Sheffield UK "The difference between theory and practice is much smaller in theory than in practice..." ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Check out the new SourceForge.net Marketplace. It's the best place to buy or sell services for just about anything Open Source. http://sourceforge.net/services/buy/index.php _______________________________________________ Emc-users mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users
