Nobody's sure what went on in Bolsa Chica, CA, when gear-shaped stones were used there 8,700 years ago, but a popular belief is that at least some activity revolved around manufacturing.
Bodine Electric Co. of Chicago, IL., has a 97-year history of fine-and medium-pitch gear manufacturing. Like anywhere else, traditions, old systems, and structures can be beneficial, but they can also become paradigms and obstacles to further improvements. We were producing a high quality product, but our goal was to become more cost effective. Carbide hobbing is seen as a technological innovation capable of enabling a dramatic, rather than an incremental, enhancement to productivity and cost savings.
The author has written this book primarily from the viewpoint of analyzing vibrations on heavy industrial and mill gearing that may have been in service for a prolonged time. The purpose is to diagnose problems, especially the source or cause of failure. However, the principles and analysis techniques can be used for all types and sizes of gears, as well as for gear noise analysis.
Traditionally, high-quality gears are cut to shape from forged blanks. Great accuracy can be obtained through shaving and grinding of tooth forms, enhancing the power capacity, life and quietness of geared power transmissions. In the 1950s, a process was developed for forging gears with teeth that requires little or no metal to be removed to achieve final geometry. The initial process development was undertaken in Germany for the manufacture of bevel gears for automobile differentials and was stimulated by the lack of available gear cutting equipment at that time. Later attention has turned to the forging of spur and helical gears, which are more difficult to form due to the radial disposition of their teeth compared with bevel gears. The main driver of these developments, in common with most component manufacturing, is cost. Forming gears rather than cutting them results in increased yield from raw material and also can increase productivity. Forging gears is therefore of greater advantage for large batch quantities, such as required by the automotive industry.
In recent years, the demands for load capacity and fatigue life of gears constantly increased while weight and volume had to be reduced. To achieve those aims, most of today's gear wheels are heat treated so tooth surfaces will have high wear resistance. As a consequence of heat treatment, distortion unavoidably occurs. With the high geometrical accuracy and quality required for gears, a hard machining process is needed that generates favorable properties on the tooth surfaces and the near-surface material with high reliability.
Economic production is one of the main concerns of any manufacturing facility. In recent years, cost increases and tougher statutory requirements have increasingly made cutting fluids a problematic manufacturing and cost factor in metalworking. Depending on the cutting fluid, production process and supply unit, cutting-fluid costs may account for up to 16% of workpiece cost. In some cases, they exceed tool cost by many times (Ref. 1). The response by manufacturers is to demand techniques for dry machining (Ref. 2).
Crown gearings are not a new type of gear system. On the contrary, they have been in use since very early times for various tasks. Their earliest form is that of the driving sprocket, found in ancient Roman watermills or Dutch windmills. The first principles of gear geometry and simple methods of production (shaper cutting) were developed in the 1940s. In the 1950s, however, crown gears' importance declined. Their tasks were, for example, taken over by bevel gears, which were easier to manufacture and could transmit greater power. Current subject literature accordingly contains very little information on crown gears, directed mainly to pointing out their limitations (Ref. 1).
Face-milled hypoid pinions produced by the three-cut, Fixed Setting system - where roughing is done on one machine and finishing for the concave-OB and convex-IB tooth flanks is done on separate machines with different setups - are still in widespread use today.
Users of gear-cutting tools probably do not often consciously consider the raw material from which those hobs, broaches or shavers are made. However, a rudimentary awareness of the various grades and their properties may allow tool users to improve the performance or life of their tools, or to address tool failures. The high-speed steel from which the tool is made certainly is not the only factor affecting tool performance, but as the raw material, the steel may be the first place to start.