I was wondering if there are any cheap plastic gear suppliers that the members of this newsgroup favor? I'm interested in buying a few dozen gears of different sizes, and wondering where I can get the best deal (maybe just a couple grab-bag kits?). I saw a few places like jameco, kronosrobotics, etc...but was wondering what others are out there.
Well, at first it appears to be expensive. But let's see. . . How many hours, days do you spend searching for a set of gears that would work for your application? How much is that time worth to you? You happen to find a set of cheap plastic gears that might work, but the pinion or motor gear doesn't fit your motors. Plus the shaft holes in the rest of the gears you got are too big. Do you machine up some bushings or adapters then? You could get someone to machine a gear for you, but that really costs big time. Unless you know how to machine your own. Yeah you could get a set of cheap plastic gears for say $5.95 a set, but the odds aren't good that it'll work with your motors. It always seems the motor shaft doesn't mate up with any of the pinoin gears. So personally I think it's cheaper actually to buy just what you want, not to try and rig up something to maybe work.
If your looking for really tiny bore shaft sizes down to 0.6mm, then
formatting link
is usually the place to go. All my little pager motors only go down to .7mm I haven't seen any at .4mm or .5mm yet. The above mentioned small parts stores do have metric sizes, but not that small. But they do sell bronze, steel and plastic gear and pinion stock so you could drill your own bore size. But drilling .5mm bores just right is pretty tricky. Another interesting source of small gears is to buy a RC servo replacement gear set. But drilling the holes for the gear drive train can be very tricky.
PolyTech Forum website is not affiliated with any of the manufacturers or service providers discussed here.
All logos and trade names are the property of their respective owners.