After shaping or hobbing, the tooth flanks must be either chamfered or duburred. Here it is paramount that the secondary burr produced will not be formed into the flank, but to the face of the gear, because during hardening, the secondary burr will straighten up and, due to its extreme hardness, will lead to excessive tool wear.

Profitable hard machining of tooth flanks in mass production has now become possible thanks to a number of newly developed production methods. As used so far, the advantages of hard machining over green shaving or rolling are the elaborately modified tooth flanks are produced with a scatter of close manufacturing tolerances. Apart from an increase of load capacity, the chief aim is to solve the complex problem of reducing the noise generation by load-conditioned kinematic modifications of the tooth mesh. In Part II, we shall deal with operating sequences and machining results and with gear noise problems.

The concept of "transmission error" is relatively new and stems from research work in the late 1950s by Gregory, Harris and Munro,(1) together with the need to check the accuracy of gear cutting machines. The corresponding commercial "single flank" testing equipment became available in the 1960s, but it was not until about ten years ago that it became generally used, and only recently has it been possible to test reliably at full load and full speed.

The NASA Lewis Research Center investigated the effect of tooth profile on the acoustic behavior of spur gears through experimental techniques. The tests were conducted by Cleveland State University (CSU) in NASA Lewis' spur gear testing apparatus. Acoustic intensity (AI) measurements of the apparatus were obtained using a Robotic Acoustic Intensity Measurement System (RAIMS). This system was developed by CSU for NASA to evaluate the usefulness of a highly automated acoustic intensity measurement tool in the reverberant environment of gear transmission test cells.

Vehicle gear noise testing is a complex and often misunderstood subject. Gear noise is really a system problem.(1) most gearing used for power transmission is enclosed in a housing and, therefore, little or no audible sound is actually heard from the gear pair.(2) The vibrations created by the gears are amplified by resonances of structural elements. This amplification occurs when the speed of the gear set is such that the meshing frequency or a multiply of it is equal to a natural frequency of the system in which the gears are mounted.

Anyone involved in the design, manufacture and use of gears is concerned with three general characteristics relative to their application: noise, accuracy, and strength or surface durability. In the article, we will be dealing with probably the most aggravating of the group, gear noise.