With the 175GMS nano, Gleason brings submicron-level inspection capabilities to smaller gears, helping ensure minimal noise, greater precision, and longer life
Complete inspection of gear surface finishes at the submicron level became a reality with the introduction of Gleason’s 300GMS nano, in 2022. The new system ushered in an exciting new era in gear inspection. For the first time, producers of EV transmission gears, and gears for other applications requiring very tight tolerances and low noise requirements, could quickly inspect surface finishes and perform extremely reliable noise analysis at submicron levels—benefits that were almost impossible to achieve just a few years ago.
The arrival of Gleason’s Hard Finishing Cell (HFC) in 2018 represented a paradigm shift in the way automotive transmission gears and gears for e-drives, could be produced in high volumes. Now, for the first time, 100 percent inspection of every gear, and every gear tooth was possible in-process, without impacting the high speeds at which these gears need to be hard finished. Identifying, and correcting for, conditions that create unacceptable noise behavior in these gears, on the fly, was finally a reality too.
Mitutoyo America Corporation has released the RTX Roundtracer Extreme all-in-one measuring system that integrates roundness, contour and surface roughness measurement functions on a single platform to save time and improve productivity.
Gear inspection has long been a highly specialized costly investment and an overall challenging part of the gear manufacturing process. Given that complicated gages, testers, and CNC equipment all go into creating high quality gears, companies may want to invest in a CMM to streamline inspection.
Shop floor inspection and gaging equipment is putting advanced metrology systems right on the factory floor. Here’s a collection of articles on shop floor inspection and gages from companies like Gleason, Mahr, Comtorgage, United Tool Supply and Frenco.
During the revision of ISO 1328-1:2013 Cylindrical gears — ISO system of flank tolerance classification, ISO Technical Committee TC 60 WG2 delegates discussed proposals that the standard should be modified to ensure that it is compatible with the ISO Geometrical Product
Specification (GPS) series of standards (Refs. 1-3). This seems sensible because the gears are geometrical components, but after reviewing the implications, it was rejected because ISO TC 60 WG2 did not think the gear manufacturing industry was ready for such a radical change in measurement strategy. The feasibility of the implementation of gears into the GPS matrix of standards has been carried out and the results conclude that this is practical, provided some
key issues related to measurement uncertainty and establishing appropriate KPIs are addressed.
PTB's two microgear measurement standards and their analyses using seven measurement methods which are then presented, evaluated and compared with each other.
A reader asks: We are currently revising our gear standards and tolerances and a few questions with the new standard AGMA 2002-C16 have risen. Firstly,
the way to calculate the tooth thickness tolerance seems to need a "manufacturing profile shift coefficient" that isn't specified in the standard; neither is another standard referred to for this coefficient. This tolerance on tooth thickness is needed later to calculate the span width as well as the pin diameter. Furthermore, there seems to be no tolerancing on the major and minor diameters of a gear.