For many years chromium has been a popular alloy for heat treatable steels because of its contribution to hardenability more than offsets its costs. As a consequence, it is specified in such high-tonnage steel grades as the 5100, 4100, and 8600 series; and, as a result, about 15% of the annual U.S. consumption of chromium is used in constructional alloy steels.

Several methods of oil jet lubrication of gears are practiced by the gear industry. These include the oil jet directed into the mesh, out of the mesh and radially directed into the gear teeth. In most cases an exact analysis is not used to determine the optimum condition such as, jet nozzle location, direction and oil jet velocity, for best cooling. As a result many gear sets are operating without optimum oil jet lubrication and cooling.

How dynamic load affects the pitting fatigue life of external spur gears was predicted by using NASA computer program TELSGE. TELSGE was modified to include an improved gear tooth stiffness model, a stiffness-dynamic load iteration scheme and a pitting-fatigue-life prediction analysis for a gear mesh. The analysis used the NASA gear life model developed by Coy, methods of probability and statistics and gear tooth dynamic loads to predict life. In general, gear life predictions based on dynamic loads differed significantly from those based on static loads, with the predictions being strongly influenced by the maximum dynamic load during contact.

Why Brushes? In this age of hi-tech, robots, automatic machines, machining cells, etc., is there a niche somewhere for power brushes? Let me answer by asking another question. What tool does the gear manufacturer have in his arsenal that allows him to deburr green gears, hardened gears, hobbed gears, ground gears and shaved gears? What tool allows him to deburr powder metal gears - green and sintered - brass gears, bronze gears, stainless gears made of exotic materials such as inconel, waspaloy, or hastaloy, and fiber and plastic gears? How about spur gears, helical gears, sprockets, both internal and external splines, clutch teeth and pump gears?

In principal, the design of internal helical gear teeth is the same as that for external helical gears. Any of the basic rack forms used for external helical gears may be applied to internal helical gears. The internal gear drive, however, has several limitations; not only all those which apply to external gears, but also several others which are peculiar to internal gears. As with external gears, in order to secure effective tooth action, interferences must be avoided. The possible interferences on an internal gear drive are as follows: 1. Involute interference. To avoid this, all of the working profile of the internal tooth must be of involute form.

In 1985 a new tooling concept for high volume gear production was introduced to the gear manufacturing industry. Since then this tool, the wafer shaper cutter, has proven itself in scores of applications as a cost-effective, consistent producer of superior quality parts. This report examines the first high-production installation at the plant of a major automotive supplies, where a line of twenty shapers is producing timing chain sprockets.

Plane strain fracture toughness of twelve high-carbon steels has been evaluated to study the influence of alloying elements, carbon content and retained austenite. The steels were especially designed to simulate the carburized case microstructure of commonly used automotive type gear steels. Results show that a small variation in carbon can influence the K IC significantly. The beneficial effect of retained austenite depends both on its amount and distribution. The alloy effect, particularly nickel, becomes significant only after the alloy content exceeds a minimum amount. Small amounts of boron also appear beneficial.

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.

This article describes a method of obtaining gear tooth profiles from the geometry of the rack (or hob) that is used to generate the gear. This method works for arbitrary rack geometries, including the case when only a numerical description of the rack is available. Examples of a simple rack, rack with protuberances and a hob with root chamfer are described. The application of this technique to the generation of boundary element meshes for gear tooth strength calculation and the generation of finite element models for the frictional contact analysis of gear pairs is also described.

In our last issue, the labels on the drawings illustrating "Involutometry" by Harlan Van Gerpan and C. Kent Reece were inadvertently omitted. For your convenience we have reproduced the corrected illustrations here. We regret any inconvenience this may have caused our readers.