Gear Expo '95, scheduled for November 12-15 at the Indiana Convention center in Indianapolis, IN, will attract more exhibitors from a wider array of industries than any previous show, according to the show's sponsor, the American Gear Manufacturers Association.

Gear grinding is one of the most expensive and least understood aspects of gear manufacturing. But with pressures for reduced noise, higher quality and greater efficiency, gear grinding appears to be on the rise.

An engineer's responsibility for verifying a new design or product concept as manufacturable early in the development cycle is a tough challenge. What appears to work on a blueprint or in a three-dimensional CAD file on a computer screen many not work on the factory floor; and the downstream impact on the manufacturing process of an undetected design flaw can be enormous. Costs can run into the millions.

For this interview, we spoke with George Wyss, president, and Dennis Richmond, vice president of Reishauer Corporation about gear grinding and its place in gear manufacturing today.

Okay, so you want to make some high quality gears for your customers, and you want to make a profit for your company, but you don't want to make a mess of the environment. What can you do?

Today gear drive operations have several options when selecting the proper lubricant for their gearboxes. As in the past, the primary lubricant used for gearbox lubrication is mineral oil. But with the advances in technology, synthetic hydrocarbons (PAOs) and polyglycols show very specific advantages in certain applications. With gear drives becoming more and more precise, it is now also to the benefit of the gear operator to verify that he or she has the proper additive package and viscosity in the lubricant selected. Fig. 1 shoes that a gear oil is a combination of a base oil and specific additives. The base oils can be either mineral oil, a synthetic or even in some cases a combination of the two.

Business ethics are like apple pie and motherhood. Few people are willing to come out agin'em. But in reablity, apple pie is full of fat and refined sugar, motherhood is not what it was when June Cleaver ran the kitchen, and business ethics? Well, it's always been easier to talk about them than to actually practice them, and things certainly haven't improved in the last few years.

Continuing our series of interviews with industry leaders, Gear Technology spoke recently with Bradley Lawton, executive vice president of Star Cutter Co., about the role and direction of cutting tools in the gear industry today.

There's a reason they call it catastrophic gear failure: For example, if the line goes down at a large aluminum rolling mill because a gear set goes bad, the cost can run up to a whopping $200,000 a week. Even in smaller operations, the numbers alone (not to mention all the other problems) can be a plant manager's worst nightmare.

Question: When we purchase our first CNC gear hobbing machine, what questions should we ask about the software? What do we need to know to correctly specify the system requirements?