The type of lubricant and the method of applying it to the tooth flanks of large open gears is very important from the point of view of lubrication technology and maintenance. When selecting the type of lubricant and the application method, it is important to check whether it is possible to feed the required lubricant quantity to the load-carrying tooth flanks, This is necessary to avoid deficient lubrication, damage to the gear and operational malfunctions. It is important to determine the type of lubricant, which may be fluid or grease-like. The consistency of the lubricant will have a direct impact on the ability of the lubrication system to feed adequately the lubricant to the gear. The interactions between the common types of lubricant and the lubrication application methods for open gear drives are shown in Fig. 1.

Ready or not, QS-9000 is here. If you are a first-tier supplier to one of the Big Three automotive companies, you've already heard that compliance with this new quality standard is now an entry-level requirement for doing business with Ford, General Motors and Chrysler. If you're a second-or third-tier supplier, you can expect the ripple effect of this new standard to hit your company one way or another.

Many people in the gear industry have heard of skiving, a process wherein solid carbide or inserted carbide blade hobs with 15 - 60 degrees of negative rake are used to recut gears to 62 Rc. The topic of this article is the use of neutral (zero) rake solid carbide hobs to remove heat treat distortion, achieving accuracies of AGMA 8 to AGMA 14, DIN 10-5 and improving surface finish on gears from 8 DP - 96 DP (.3 module - .26 m.).

Could the tip chamfer that manufacturing people usually use on the tips of gear teeth be the cause of vibration in the gear set? The set in question is spur, of 2.25 DP, with 20 degrees pressure angle. The pinion has 14 teeth and the mating gear, 63 teeth. The pinion turns at 535 rpm maximum. Could a chamfer a little over 1/64" cause a vibration problem?

Durability is the most important criterion used to define the quality of a gear. The freezing of metals has been acknowledged for almost thirty years as an effective method for increasing durability, or "wear life," and decreasing residual stress in tool steels. The recent field of deep cryogenics (below -300 degrees F) has brought us high temperature superconductors, the superconducting super collider, cryo-biology, and magnotehydrodynamic drive systems. It has also brought many additional durability benefits to metals.

An analytical method is presented to predict the shifts of the contact ellipses on spiral bevel gear teeth under load. The contact ellipse shift is the motion of the point to its location under load. The shifts are due to the elastic motions of the gear and pinion supporting shafts and bearings. The calculations include the elastic deflections of the gear shafts and the deflections of the four shaft bearings. The method assumes that the surface curvature of each tooth is constant near the unloaded pitch point. Results from these calculations will help designers reduce transmission weight without seriously reducing transmission performance.

The acceptance by discerning customers of passenger cars is dependent upon both the actual noise lever and the subjective noise character. The subjective noise character itself can contain, among other features, undesirable noise phenomena which become apparent at certain points in the vehicle operating range. One such critical phenomenon is gear rattle, which is mainly present under low speed, high load conditions. Due to changes in the angular velocity of the crankshaft, gear rattle under driving conditions occurs at the unloaded gears and splines.

The purpose of gear inspection is to: Assure required accuracy and quality, Lower overall cost of manufacture by controlling rejects and scrap, Control machines and machining practices and maintain produced accuracy as machines and tools wear, Determine hear treat distortions to make necessary corrections.

This article presents an efficient and direct method for the synthesis of compound planetary differential gear trains for the generation of specified multiple speed ratios. It is a train-value method that utilizes the train values of the integrated train components of the systems to form design equations which are solved for the tooth numbers of the gears, the number of mating gear sets and the number of external contacts in the system. Application examples, including vehicle differential transmission units, rear-end differentials with unit and fractional speed ratios, multi-input functions generators and robot wrist joints are given.

Today it is common practice when climb hobbing to keep the direction of the hob thread the same as that of the helical gear. The same generalization holds true for the mass production of gears for automobiles. It is the authors' opinion, however, that conventional hobbing with a reverse-handed hob is more effective for the high-speed manufacture of comparatively small module gears for automobiles. The authors have proven both experimentally and theoretically that reverse-handed conventional hobbing, using a multi-thread hob with a smaller diameter is very effective for lengthening the life of the hob and for increasing cutting efficiency at high speeds.