Manufacturers have a relatively new option that offers several key advantages—gear skiving on machining centers. Gear skiving on a mill-turn machining center with fully synchronous spindles is highly efficient, fast, and accurate. In some cases when producing small and medium-sized volumes, gear skiving will gradually replace established gear-cutting processes.

Why is the industry considering changing from well-established gear manufacturing processes to something that is much more complex at first glance? Gear manufacturing has been its own “world” in metal cutting, dominated by companies with very specific expertise around gear technology. Production output has been high, but flexibility is limited. The technicians running these machines are highly skilled, but recruiting new staff with these skill sets has become more and more difficult.

A number of beneficial factors have made skiving an attractive process for the series production of gears.

Gear skiving offers great opportunities for production with step-changing productivity, particularly for internal gears, whilst offering high-quality finishing capabilities and being applicable on a 5-axis machine tool with its inherent flexibility and multifunctionality.