For those using conventional gear hobbers:
- After determining the ideal ratio needed to fabricate a helical gear, how do you determine the best combination of (A/B)*(C/D) in your gearbox that closely approximates the ratio?
- how often do you need to change your gear setup?
- how long does it usually take for you to find the right values for A, B, C, and D? (half an hour? an hour?)
...
This can indeed be a difficult problem for odd sizes. Here's a web site that has a great discussion group on hobbing, and offers computer software to solve the gear train setup:
FWIW, hobbing for the hobbyist has been a great interest of mine. Electronic gearing is the solution for this problem. You slave the index drive to the spindle. Everything can then be done on a knee mill and indexing head. A fellow named Jon Stevenson has one up and running. Another fellow, named Don Foreman, has designed and built a better brainbox. Just for me. He'd be glad to share with anyone. I was all set to have it running last winter until more urgent matters intervened.
Karl
The very current issue of Model Engineer's Workshop, the British mag, has an article on gear hobbing which uses electronic synchronization.
GWE
Karl Townsend wrote:
Marv Klotz has a program to do just that, I think.
-Justin
The website sells the software for $225? Is that an acceptable price?
Would you please send me a copy? I'd be most interested.
Karl
Yes, GEARATIO. He may also want to take a look at GEARFIND. Both are free for the downloading.
Regards, Marv
Home Shop Freeware - Tools for People Who Build Things
The performance on these applications is not that good. I'm going to build my own gear set finder instead. It will have the ability to search for 2-gear, 4-gear, and 6-gear combinations. I'm also going to put in the ability to remember configurations for multiple machines, as well as a ratio calculator.
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