The high cost of college and the crushing weight of student debt are seldom far from the headlines these days. Community colleges and technical sch...

A current project has reminded me just how difficult it is to pull cost estimates together. You would think that with business being slow due to th...

What a pleasant surprise this week to get a request for information on training rookie gear machine operators! It is easy to get caught up in the n...

A best practice in gear design is to limit the amount of backlash to a minimum value needed to accommodate manufacturing tolerances, misalignments, and deflections, in order to prevent the non-driving side of the teeth to make contact and rattle. Industry standards, such as ANSI/AGMA 2002 and DIN3967, provide reference values of minimum backlash to be used in the gear design. However, increased customers' expectations in vehicle noise eduction have pushed backlash and allowable manufacturing tolerances to even lower limits. This is especially true in the truck market, where engines are quieter because they run at lower speeds to improve fuel economy, but they quite often run at high torsional vibration levels. Furthermore, gear and shaft arrangements in truck transmissions have become more complex due to increased number of speeds and to improve efficiency. Determining the minimum amount of backlash is quite a challenge. This paper presents an investigation of minimum backlash values of helical gear teeth applied to a light-duty pickup truck transmission. An analytical model was developed to calculate backlash limits of each gear pair when not transmitting load, and thus susceptible to generate rattle noise, through different transmission power paths. A statistical approach (Monte Carlo) was used since a significant number of factors affect backlash, such as tooth thickness variation; center distance variation; lead; runout and pitch variations; bearing clearances; spline clearances; and shaft deflections and misalignments. Analytical results identified the critical gear pair, and power path, which was confirmed experimentally on a transmission. The approach presented in this paper can be useful to design gear pairs with a minimum amount of backlash, to prevent double flank contact and to help reduce rattle noise to lowest levels.

I'd like to apologize to the dedicated people working on revisions to the AGMA 925 standard and the Technical Report ISO 15144-1, both of which deal with the issue of micropitting. In the March/April issue of Gear Technology, we published an opinion piece in our Voices column that harshly criticized the methods for predicting micropitting outlined in ISO 15144-1.

Although the official astrological start to summer in the northern hemisphere is still three weeks away, the Memorial Day weekend just concluded ma...

My last posting discussed the problem of finding a technical leader for a gear company. Except in a few emergency situations, such as the sudden de...