Gear creating software

I have posted a few Gadgets on the Vectric forum. One of the Gadgets is a gear maker. Gadgets will also work with PartWorks version 2.5 or greater. Here is a link to the Vectric posting http://www.vectric.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=27&t=13908

I bought Gearotic Motion a while back for a project I am working on. I am designing a new fishing rod holder to be made from 1/2" 6061 T-6 Al the rear ring on the rod holder will rotate and I used a gear set I created in Gearotic Motion then I imported that file into Aspire and node edited most of the gear to only leave 2 teeth on one side and 1 tooth on the other as I only need the part to rotate 20*. I may try and patent this rod holder so I can't publish pictures at this time but it works great.

Mike

Ryan

Thank you for reminding me about your gear generating gadget and making me aware of the other gadgets you've made available to us... I was under the impression that your gear app only made single tooth drawings, leaving it up to the user to copy and paste them in a circular array.

To all

I've made a totally unbiased comparison of Ryan's gear gadget and Inkscape's generator...
On the attached image I show identical gears created by both programs... I chose to make a gear with six teeth having a Diametral Pitch of 3. The Diametral Pitch is the number of teeth per inch and 3 is a number that can nicely be routed with a 1/8" router bit. As imported, you can see that the CPP gear has vastly more nodes that the Inkscape gear. For gears to mesh smoothly and with the least amount of friction possible, they should contact each other at a single point. For this to happen, the gear faces must be curves. As imported... the CPP gear approaches this with many many short segments, while Inkscape doesn't even pretend. After the nodes have been reduced the CPP gear faces have been replaced with Bezier curves while the Inkscape faces are still straight lines. Also Ryan's gadget places the center hole that you specify, while the Inkscape generator does not place a center at all. This is actually more important than it may seem... the center of a gear with an odd number of teeth is slightly different than the center of mass that will become the snap point.

I've cut a lot of gears from the Inkscape generator, but now will have to give it a thumbs down. Thank you Ryan for a quality tool for our arsenal.

Steve

Steve, Thank you for the compliments.

You are able to control the number of nodes by adjusting the Line Resolution setting. You may need to increase the line resolution setting for smaller gears.

Ryan

I admit I didn't try any changes with the line resolution setting... for some reason I assumed it had something to do with display graphics. I see now that it allows me to increase or decrease the number of nodes. Thanks for the clarification.

On another note... I've been playing with the spiral generator. When I make a spiral, I get a line composed of a multitude of nodes, and any attempt to reduce them by using "fit to curves" results in no change... Is this a mathematics issue or is there another method to reduce the nodes?

I was able to accomplish what I wanted by using the distort feature, but would like to deal with Bezier curves if possible...

Steve

Steve,

Converting to Beziers using the Fit to Curves tool is working for me and should work fine for all cases.

Tim

Tim

interesting... It's not working for me... here's my settings, how do they compare to yours?

Steve

I typically leave a tolerance setting of 0.001". Creates a more accurate copy but at the trade-off of more nodes.

I changed to your settings and it still worked. Considering the size of the spiral may have a bearing on it, I just made it different sizes and it worked in all cases.

Can you post your .crv3d/.crv file with the spiral you are having trouble with?

Tim

Here it is...

Thanks

Steve

I have had the same type of issue fit curves and can not duplicate 100%. I am not sure why it does not always work.

Here are a couple of pictures of gears. I put a section of gear on the outside just for a little style and was amazed that I got it lined up correctly for a gear to roll around the outside to the inside.