It was a busy year for the gear industry. Large and small companies had to navigate the interest rates, tariffs, supply chain disruptions, labor shortages, and the unknown economic outlook with an election year in the U.S. Leaders that normally would be brainstorming their five-year strategic plans had to get comfortable with a day-to-day strategy. As each quarter ended, however, AGMA witnessed resiliency, innovation, collaboration, and even quite a bit of growth for some sectors—it was an exciting year to visit members in person.

Before diving into the latest committee developments, I want to remind everyone about the 2023 Emerging Technology Webinar Series, available on-demand until December 31. (Don’t miss this valuable resource before it’s removed to make room for our 2025 webinar series.) 

If you are a true gear geek, you are probably aware of AGMA’s Fall Technical Meeting (FTM). However, we have true gear geeks attending the FTM for the first time each year, and we are thrilled to see that!

I just returned from two information-packed days in Detroit, running the 2024 AGMA Emerging Technology Forum and the AGMA Technical Committee meeting on standards development for electric vehicle technology. AGMA provided attendees with high-level presentations on materials, advanced IIoT experiences, interactive sessions on the future of robots, and initial standards work for EV technology.

AGMA wants you to be involved in gear standards development. Committee meetings are a great place to network and collaborate with experts in the field, broaden your knowledge, capture technical expertise in writing, refine the standards you use, and see how your influence helps shape best practices throughout America and around the world. We are especially looking for experts to join four new standardization projects.

In 2023, the Technical Division Executive Committee (TDEC) worked on a technical committee restructuring that replaced the standing, topic-specific committees with working groups, which would focus only on an active project and fold when the project was completed. Due to feedback received on the change, the TDEC took a step back and re-evaluated the restructuring. This led to a new committee-based structure that takes the good parts of project working groups and merges them with the good parts of technical committees. The committees are consolidated and include sub-working groups to perform the work on information sheets and standards.

The American Gear Manufacturers Association (AGMA) was presented with the Trade Show Executive’s Fastest 50 Grand Award in the “Fastest-Growing Show by Percentage Growth in Total Attendance in 2023” category on May 9 at the Fastest 50 Awards & Summit in Las Vegas.

AGMA is pleased to announce the publication of two new revisions: ANSI/AGMA 2116-B24, Evaluation of Double Flank Testers for Radial Composite Measurement of Gears, written by the AGMA Gear Accuracy Committee, and ANSI/AGMA 6008-B24, Specifications for Powder Metallurgy Gears written by the AGMA Powder Metallurgy Committee.

Gear Technology began with the May/June 1984 issue. Forty years later, we’re still going strong! Please join us in looking back at some of our milestones and celebrating what makes this publication truly unique in the marketplace.

The inaugural issue of Gear Technology marked a significant change in the industry. I was 13 years into my career, working at my third company and in my fifth year on AGMA’s Helical Gear Rating Committee. Back then, few engineers moved around; you started at a gear company, were indoctrinated in their way of doing things, and hoped to advance by making very incremental changes to the “old family recipe.”