There are several methods available for improving the quality of spur and helical gears following the standard roughing operations of hobbing or shaping. Rotary gear shaving and roll-finishing are done in the green or soft state prior to heat treating.
Precision gears play a vital role in today's economy. Through their application, automobile transmissions are more compact and efficient, ships sail faster, and diesel locomotives haul more freight. Today great emphasis is being placed upon the reduction of noise in all gear applications and, to be quiet, gears must be accurate.
The following article is a collection of data intended to give the reader a general overview of information related to a relatively new subject within the gear cutting industry. Although carbide hobbing itself is not necessarily new, some of the methods and types of application are. While the subject content of this article may be quite broad, it should not be considered all-inclusive. The actual results obtained and the speeds, feeds, and tool life used in carbide hobbing applications can vary significantly.
Question: I have just become involved with the inspection of gears in a production operation and wonder why the procedure specifies that four involute checks must be made on each side of the tooth of the gear being produced, where one tooth is checked and charted in each quadrant of the gear. Why is this done? These particular gears are checked in the pre-shaved, finish-shaved, and the after-heat-treat condition, so a lot of profile checking must be done.
The merits of CBN physical characteristics over conventional aluminum oxide abrasives in grinding performance are reviewed. Improved surface integrity and consistency in drive train products can be achieved by the high removal rate of the CBN grinding process. The influence of CBN wheel surface conditioning procedure on grinding performance is also discussed.
Some years back, most spiral bevel gear sets were produced as cut, case hardened, and lapped. The case hardening process most frequently used was and is case carburizing. Many large gears were flame hardened, nitrided, or through hardened (hardness around 300 BHN) using medium carbon alloy steels, such as 4140, to avoid higher distortions related to the carburizing and hardening process.
In May of this year the U.S. International Trade Commission made public its Report to the President on the condition of the U.S. gear industry. This 200+ page document is the result of a two-year study by the commission, with the help of the AGMA staff and members. It is the most comprehensive and current analytical coverage of the industry conditions and tends presently available. Because of the importance of this report to the industry, GEAR TECHNOLOGY is devoting a good portion of this issue to reprinting the Executive Summary for our readers.
Cutter Sharpening
Cutter sharpening is very important both during manufacturing and subsequently in resharpening after dulling. Not only does this process affect cutter "over cutting edge" quality and the quality of the part cut, but it can also affect the manner in which chip flow takes place on the cutter face if the surface finished is too rough or rippled.
Cubic boron nitride (CBN) finishing of carburized gearing has been shown to have certain economic and geometric advantages and, as a result, it has been applied to a wide variety of precision gears in many different applications.
In critical applications such as aerospace drive systems, however, any new process must be carefully evaluated before it is used in a production application. Because of the advantages associated with this process, a test program was instituted to evaluate the load capacity of aerospace-quality gears finished by the CBN process as compared to geometrically identical gears finished by conventional grinding processes.
This article presents a brief description of the CBN process, its advantages in an aerospace application, and the results of an extensive test program conducted by Boeing Helicopters (BH) aimed at an evaluation of the effects of this process on the scoring, surface durability, and bending fatigue properties of spur gears.
In addition, the results of an x-ray diffraction study to determine the surface and subsurface residual stress distributions of both shot-peened and nonshot-peened CBN-ground gears as compared to similar conventionally ground gears are also presented.