The usual route to a printable gear in CAD is a long session of sketching tooth profiles by hand, and that kind of default modeling eats time fast. ChandraAwesome's GearLab takes a different path: a custom FeatureScript built for Onshape that automates the whole gear design process. Instead of drawing complex gears from scratch, the user fills in a dialogue box and the script does the rest, which should speed up any gear-heavy modeling workflow considerably.
The build itself is a custom feature for Onshape with configurable parameters exposed through a GearLab dialogue box. There are two modes, Manual and Inherit from Parent Gear. The numbers on offer cover the usual suspects: 24 teeth, module 2, a 20 degree pressure angle, a 15 degree helix angle, 20 mm face width and an 8 mm bore. The script then generates 3D gear bodies straight from those settings.
Several details stand out. It handles spur, bevel, helical and worm types, plus internal configurations, planetary setups and aligned face gear pairs. It can compute a mating child gear automatically and align it to a parent body, and it can display coordinate axes and pitch cone surfaces for checking geometry. Setting helix and bevel angles to zero yields a plain spur gear. In one demonstration the module went from 5 mm to 8 mm on the fly and a shaft angle of 90 degrees was set. The maker also notes the tool helps with gear alignments.
It is not finished business, though. The spur gear script sticks to spur and helical work and cannot produce beveled ones, the face width field apparently needs dividing by the module to hit a desired width, and there is no backlash input at the moment. Those are the rough edges to watch while the rest of the tool clearly works.
Project by ChandraAwesome. Watch it on their YouTube channel: