In the May/June Issue of your excellent magazine. Mr. Stan Jakuba discusses a serious problem, not only for the gear industry, but any machinery where fluctuating torque is encountered. I would like to make the following comments to his article...

A pair of spur gears generally has an effective lead error which is caused, not only by manufacturing and assembling errors, but also by the deformations of shafts, bearings and housings due to the transmitted load. The longitudinal load distribution on a contact line of the teeth of the gears is not uniform because of the effective lead error.

For the last few years, the market has been tough for the U.S. gear industry. That statement will cause no one any surprise. The debate is about what to do. One sure sign of this is the enormous attention Congress and the federal government are now placing on "competitiveness."

Circular arc helical gears have been proposed by Wildhaber and Novikov (Wildhaber-Novikov gears). These types of gears became very popular in the sixties, and many authors in Russia, Germany, Japan and the People's Republic of China made valuable contributions to this area. The history of their researches can be the subject of a special investigation, and the authors understand that their references cover only a very small part of the bibliography on this topic.

Joe Arvin comments on his recent trip to Scandinavia and how U.S. defense dollars are being spent overseas. J.D. Smith responds to an article on gear noise from the previous issue.

In ParI 1 several scuffing (scoring) criteria were shown ultimately to converge into one criterion, the original flash temperature criterion according to Blok. In Part 2 it will be shown that all geometric influences may be concentrated in one factor dependent on only four independent parameters, of which the gear ratio, the number of teeth of the pinion, and the addendum modification coefficient of the pinion are significant.

How important is the right choice of coupling in determining successful machine design? Consider the following example. A transmission of appropriate size was needed to transfer the speed of the engine driver to that of the driven generator. The transmission was properly selected and sized to endure the rated power requirements indefinitely, but after only a short time in operation, it failed anyway. What happened? The culprit in the case was a coupling. It provided the necessary power and protection against misalignment but it lacked the ability to isolate the gears from the torque peaks of the diesel engine.

Noisy gear trains have been a common problem for gear designers for a long time. With the demands for smaller gear boxes transmitting more power at higher rpms and incumbent demands for greater efficiency, gear engineers are always searching for new ways to reduce vibration and limit noise without increasing costs.

The load capacity rating of gears had its beginning in the 18th century at Leiden University when Prof. Pieter van Musschenbroek systematically tested the wooden teeth of windmill gears, applying the bending strength formula published by Galilei one century earlier. In the next centuries several scientists improved or extended the formula, and recently a Draft International Standard could be presented.

A change has taken place within the industry that is going to have an enormous effect on the marketing, sales, and purchasing of gear manufacturing and related equipment. This change was the American Gear Manufacturers' Association, first biennial combination technical conference and machine tool minishow.