Jon Elson wrote...... >>>>>>>>It just seems to me that if you have a CNC machine of any type, you should be able to cut a master tool for the form required. Then, that tool could cut the gear teeth directly, and reduce a 5 hour job to 15 minutes! Even if you only have a mill, you can mount a disc on the spindle and a lathe-type tool in the vise, and make a gear cutter by laboriously following the tooth profile. Then, you could cut radial slots to form the cutting teeth, >>>>>>>>>
I'm sure you are right Jon but look at my tag line.... The only way I have so far made a successful pinion cutter as as in the last of the links in Kirk's post of the 12th. i.e. make a form tool for the radius of the tooth top, turn a disk with this cutter, drill an array of holes in the disk, cut slots into the holes and then bend the teeth back to get relief on them before hardening and tempering. This method works but has two major potential problem areas - if all the teeth are not exactly like and bent back by exactly the same amount, the cutter will not cut on all the teeth and, more importantly, there is a significant chance of the teeth going out-of-flat during the bending back process and by warping in hardening. However, I have made this method work although it took me a whole day to get a good working cutter. Even with cnc and a pretty tight machine as I have, its still easy to get errors of a few thous. when making a profiled disk cutter less than 3/8" diameter and about 1/32" thick and that error is then a significant percentage of final size and can have a serious effect on the action of the resulting gear. I will, however, give some though to what you say and it may be possible to make maybe a 4 or 5 tooth cutter by generating relief with the form tool. At the moment my machine is our of action as I had problems with the electronics and so I am taking the opportunity to rebuild my controller so as to tidy things up a bit and add in a couple of extra features I want... -- Best wishes, Ian ____________ Ian W. Wright Sheffield UK "The difference between theory and practice is much smaller in theory than in practice..." ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Check out the new SourceForge.net Marketplace. It's the best place to buy or sell services for just about anything Open Source. http://sourceforge.net/services/buy/index.php _______________________________________________ Emc-users mailing list Emc-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users
