More than 120 attendees from the American gear community congregated in Saline, MI, last month for the 2007 Sigma Pool Gear Seminar.

The three-day event consisted of two full days of addresses by Sigma Pool employees on various gearing technologies. The first day focused on bevel gear technology and the third on parallel axis gearing technology. Sandwiched in the middle was the WZL Aachen gear conference, a bi-annual event that presents research results in 10 sessions.

“It’s always surprising to me that we get so many busy people who are willing to take three days out of the office and listen to the Sigma Pool explain our way of thinking,” says Andreas Montag, marketing manager at the Sigma Pool. “They’re not all local to the Detroit area and we’re very pleased that so many people are willing to make the trip.”

Among some highlights of the bevel gear day were a presentation by Günter Mikoleizig, Klingelnberg’s manager of design and development for gear in-spection machinery, on the company’s new GINA software, which provides quicker and more accurate gear measurements. In some of the other 30-minute sessions, Dr. Joachim Thomas, the company’s head of application engineering, presented on the correlations he has found between design and road tests and Dr. Alexander Langvogt, technical director in charge of running test machines, shared some smart and fast test methods for bevel gears.

Interestingly enough, Montag thought some of the event’s most productive moments took place during the between-session coffee breaks. “At the shows, people walk by and maybe stop for an hour to talk, then walk over to the competitor and talk to them for an hour. In this environment, we have them for eight hours and the coffee breaks provide a wonderful opportunity for people to talk to our engineers as well as interact with their friends and competitors.”

Prof. Dr.-Ing Fritz Klocke and Dr.-Ing Alois Mundt, managing director of Liebherr-Verzahntechnik Kempten, catch up during the tour of Liebherr’s Saline, MI facilities.

Thierry Guertin of the Klingelnberg-Oerlikon Tech Center enlightens the crowd on bevel gear prototyping.

Dr.-Ing. Andreas Mehr (Liebherr-Verzahntechnik Kempten) presents a lecture on “Grinding Technology—Basics and the Future.”

Prof. Dr.-Ing. Fritz Klocke and the young engineers that comprise the WZL Aachen Gear Conference pose with Dr.-Ing. Klaus Finkenwirth of Liebherr-Verzahntechnik Kempten and Dr.-Ing Hartmuth Müller of Klingelnberg GmbH Hückeswagen.