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.

This article deals with certain item to be taken into consideration for gear grinding, common problems that arise in gear grinding and their solutions. The discussion will be limited to jobbing or low-batch production environments, where experimental setup and testing is not possible for economic and other reasons.

This article investigates fillet features consequent to tooth grinding by generating methods. Fillets resulting from tooth cutting and tooth grinding at different pressure angles and with different positions of grinding wheel are compared. Ways to improve the final fillet of the ground teeth with regard to tooth strength and noise, as well as the grinding conditions, are shown. "Undergrinding" is defined and special designs for noiseless gears are described.

Modern manufacturing processes have become an ally of the product designer in producing higher quality, higher performing components in the transportation industry. This is particularly true in grinding systems where the physical properties of CBN abrasives have been applied to improving cycle times, dimensional consistency, surface integrity and overall costs. Of these four factors, surface integrity offers the greatest potential for influencing the actual design of highly stressed, hardened steel components.

Involute spur gears are very sensitive to gear misalignment. Misalignment will cause the shift of the bearing contact toward the edge of the gear tooth surfaces and transmission errors that increase gear noise. Many efforts have been made to improve the bearing contact of misaligned spur gears by crowning the pinion tooth surface. Wildhaber(1) had proposed various methods of crowning that can be achieved in the process of gear generation. Maag engineers have used crowning for making longitudinal corrections (Fig. 1a); modifying involute tooth profile uniformly across the face width (Fig. 1b); combining these two functions in Fig. 1c and performing topological modification (Fig. 1d) that can provide any deviation of the crowned tooth surface from a regular involute surface. (2)

Hard Gear Finishing (HGF), a relatively new technology, represents an advance in gear process engineering. The use of Computer Numerical Controlled (CNC) equipment ensures a high precision synchronous relationship between the tool spindle and the work spindle as well as other motions, thereby eliminating the need for gear trains. A hard gear finishing machine eliminates problems encountered in two conventional methods - gear shaving, which cannot completely correct gear errors in gear teeth, and gear rolling, which lacks the ability to remove stock and also drives the workpiece without a geared relationship to the master rolling gear. Such a machine provides greater accuracy, reducing the need for conventional gear crowning, which results in gears of greater face width than necessary.

The art of gear hobbing has advanced dramatically since the development and introduction of unique machine and tool features such as no backlash, super rigidity, automatic loading of cutting tools, CNC controls, additional machine power and improved cutter materials and coatings. It is essential to utilize all these features to run the machine economically.

In conventional gear grinders, grinding wheels with Alundum grains and a hardness of about 2000 HV have been used for finishing steel gears with hardnesses up to about 1000HV. In this case, the accuracy of the gears ground is greatly affected by wear of the grinding wheel because the difference in hardness is comparatively small when the gears are fully hardened.

Until recently, form gear grinding was conducted almost exclusively with dressable, conventional abrasive grinding wheels. In recent years, preformed, plated Cubic Boron Nitride (CBN) wheels have been introduced to this operation and a considerable amount of literature has been published that claim that conventional grinding wheels will be completely replaced in the future. The superior machining properties of the CBN wheel are not disputed in this paper.