Mikes Gear Cutting
I’ve been following Mike’s Models blog for some time now and Mike’s helped me out with silver soldering questions in the past. One of his current projects is to make some pinion wheels for a kids toy.
There are various techniques for cutting gear wheels, hobbing which uses a helical cutter with the work free to rotate and form tool cutting (gear milling, fly cutting of gears, single tooth cutting) which uses a shaped cutting tool and an indexing head to move the gear after cutting each tooth.
Mike has been trying out these different methods.
Gear Cutting with a hobb
Gear Cutting Revisited
Gears Completed
Mike also references John Stevenson’s article on Gear Cutting and I’ve found the following two references via google.
CNC cutting of gears
Meshing with Gears website
Posted in: Machining
Tags: fly cutting, Gears
Metal sculpture in brass, mounted on an 1800s French Coin
Dave from spline broaches commented that you can also form gears by broaching. This is particularly useful for internal gears where it is difficult to use things like fly cutters.