Plastic gears are everywhere today - throughout your car, at the oceans' lowest depths, in deep space. The question, when is a metal gear a candidate for plastic conversion, can be addressed in three words, i.e. what's the application?

Chapter 2, Continued In the previous sections, development of conjugate, face milled as well as face hobbed bevel gearsets - including the application of profile and length crowning - was demonstrated. It was mentioned during that demonstration that in order to optimize the common surface area, where pinion and gear flanks have meshing contact (common flank working area), a profile shift must be introduced. This concluding section of chapter 2 explains the principle of profile shift; i.e. - how it is applied to bevel and hypoid gears and then expands on profile side shift, and the frequently used root angle correction which - from its gear theoretical understanding - is a variable profile shift that changes the shift factor along the face width. The end of this section elaborates on five different possibilities to tilt the face cutter head relative to the generating gear, in order to achieve interesting effects on the bevel gear flank form. This installment concludes chapter 2 of the Bevel Gear Technology book that lays the foundation of the following chapters, some of which also will be covered in this series.

In the previous sections, the development of conjugate bevel gearsets via hand calculations was demonstrated. The goal of this exercise was to encourage the reader to gain a basic understanding of the theory of bevel gears. This knowledge will help gear engineers to better judge bevel gear design and their manufacturing methods. In order to make the basis of this learning experience even more realistic, this chapter will convert a conjugate bevel gearset into a gearset that is suitable in a real-world application. Length and profile crowning will be applied to the conjugate flank surfaces. Just as in the previous chapter, all computations are demonstrated as manual hand calculations. This also shows that bevel gear theory is not as complicated as commonly assumed.

This article is the fourth installment in Gear Technology's series of excerpts from Dr. Hermann J. Stadtfeld's book, Gleason Bevel Gear Technology. The first three excerpts can be found in our June, July and August 2015 issues. In the previous chapter, we demonstrated the development of a face-milled spiral bevel gearset. In this section, an analogue face-hobbed bevel gearset is derived.

The calculation begins with the computation of the ring gear blank data. The geometrically relevant parameters are shown in Figure 1. The position of the teeth relative to the blank coordinate system of a bevel gear blank is satisfactorily defined with...

The question is quite broad, as there are different methods for setting various types of gears and complexity of gear assemblies, but all gears have a few things in common.

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The geometry of the bevel gear is quite complicated to describe mathematically, and much of the overall surface topology of the tooth flank is dependent on the machine settings and cutting method employed. AGMA 929-A06 — Calculation of Bevel Gear Top Land and Guidance on Cutter Edge Radius — lays out a practical approach for predicting the approximate top-land thicknesses at certain points of interest — regardless of the exact machine settings that will generate the tooth form. The points of interest that AGMA 929-A06 address consist of toe, mean, heel, and point of involute lengthwise curvature. The following method expands upon the concepts described in AGMA 929-A06 to allow the user to calculate not only the top-land thickness, but the more general case as well, i.e. — normal tooth thickness anywhere along the face and profile of the bevel gear tooth. This method does not rely on any additional machine settings; only basic geometry of the cutter, blank, and teeth are required to calculate fairly accurate tooth thicknesses. The tooth thicknesses are then transformed into a point cloud describing both the convex and concave flanks in a global, Cartesian coordinate system. These points can be utilized in any modern computer-aided design software package to assist in the generation of a 3D solid model; all pertinent tooth macrogeometry can be closely simulated using this technique. A case study will be presented evaluating the accuracy of the point cloud data compared to a physical part.

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