Shaper cut gears

I have been doing a lot of thinking about cutting gears this way. It's not new there were some attachments out there at the turn of the 20th century to do these on a shaper. The whole operation was also resurrected in the 50's in an article in Model Engineer. I have mentioned this before. Recently I came across some old Victorian gear cutting books [ Have I mentioned I collect books ] In one of these there was a crude method to also generate bevel gears from a rack.

This got me thinking and doing some limited maths and it looks as if this can also be adapted to a shaper using a single point tool. The real proof will be in actually cutting a pair and blueing them up for fit. With this in mind I had a quick look around and bought this today

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I want to reproduce the old Model Engineer layout and do a few spur gears to prove the whole setup. I then hope to do a couple of simple bevels, again to prove it, but the whole aim is to CNC this so that the whole operation can be made automatic. It won't be fast but it's biggest claim to fame will be it can cut ANY range of gears from one simple single point tool costing pence.

John S.

-- Regards,

John Stevenson Nottingham, England.

Reply to
John Stevenson
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John,

I wish you well with your project.

I spotted that shaper on eBay and would have loved to have had it had I had space - much regret disposing of my Alba 1A a decade ago - trouble is - NO floor space left !!!

Andrew Mawson Bromley, Kent, UK

Reply to
Andrew Mawson

Bloody hell, do these things need floor space? That wasn't in the plan. Can you balance these on one end of the bandsaw and a stack of Model Engineer's [ the paper variety not the bearded wrinkly variety ]

Andrew, do you have a Brierley drill grinder?

-- Regards,

John Stevenson Nottingham, England.

Reply to
John Stevenson

In article , John Stevenson writes

Nice! I see it's (probably) not too far from me. Give me a shout if you're likely to need a hand loading it up.

Cheers

Reply to
Nigel Eaton

I didn't even see that one go past on Ebay.

Having got hold of a 10" Royal shaper a while back and having spent the last few months scraping it back to some semblance of straightness, I have been thinking about gears...

My thought was to make an electronic equivalent of the gear shaper by using a DRO on the table, a stepper motor controlled dividing head (C/O Tony Jeffree possibly) and a PC or a PIC to do the interfacing between the two. Is this the way you were going?

My other, preferred, thought was to use a single point tool on the shaper to generate hobs. Then use the hobs on the lathe with a stepper motor indexing the gear blank, controlled by a rotary encoder on the mandrel. A DRO on the cross slide holding the stepper motor assembly can allow the generation of helical and hypoid gears. T.E Jacobs 30 year on!

Regards Mark Rand RTFM

Reply to
Mark Rand

So far the guy hasn't got back to me so I can't make any arrangements. According to the book I have it weighs in at 900 kg so it's not too bad, anything less than a ton don't count as heavy. Might take the Reliant

-- Regards,

John Stevenson Nottingham, England.

Reply to
John Stevenson

In article , John Stevenson writes

In that case I'm *definitely* coming along to "help". Give me a shout if necessary.

Reply to
Nigel Eaton

This approach was covered in MEW, pp54 & 55, March/April 2001

Reply to
Airy R. Bean

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