In the past gear manufacturers have had to rely on hob manufacturers' inspection of individual elements of a hob, such as lead, involute, spacing, and runout. These did not always guarantee correct gears, as contained elements may cause a hob to produce gears beyond tolerance limits.
The first part of this article included abrasive wear with two bodies, streaks and scoring, polishing, and hot and cold scuffing. This part will deal with three-body wear, scratches or grooves, and interference wear. Normal, moderate, and excessive wear will be defined, and a descriptive chart will be presented.
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.
One of our readers in England has asked for our help in locating published technical data and information on the design, manufacture, and inspection of camshaft gears. Although millions of these gears have been made and are in constant use, we are not aware of any formal material having been published. We would be pleased to hear from anyone who had knowledge of such information.
Columbus' first voyage to the Americas is not the only anniversary worthy of celebration this year. In 1892, on October 15, Wilfred Lewis gave an address to the Engineer's Club of Philadelphia, whose significance, while not as great as that of Columbus' voyage, had important results for the gearing community. In this address, Lewis first publicly outlined his formula for computing bending stress in gear teeth, a formula still in use today.
The phenomena of deterioration of surfaces are generally very complex and depend on numerous conditions which include the operating conditions, the type of load applied, the relative speeds of surfaces in contact, the temperature, lubrication, surfaces hardness and roughness, and the compatibility and nature of materials.
To mechanical engineers, the strength of gear teeth is a question of constant recurrence, and although the problem to be solved is quite elementary in character, probably no other question could be raised upon which such a diversity of opinion exists, and in support of which such an array of rules and authorities might be quoted. In 1879, Mr. John H. Cooper, the author of a well-known work on "Belting," made an examination of the subject and found there were then in existence about forty-eight well-established rules for horsepower and working strength, sanctioned by some twenty-four authorities, and differing from each other in extreme causes of 500%. Since then, a number of new rules have been added, but as no rules have been given which take account of the actual tooth forms in common use, and as no attempt has been made to include in any formula the working stress on the material so that the engineer may see at once upon what assumption a given result is based, I trust I may be pardoned for suggesting that a further investigation is necessary or desirable.
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.
There is one dimension common to both members of a pair of properly mating spur gears - the base pitch (BP). This base pitch is equal to the circular pitch of the gear on the base circle (see Fig. 1). For a helical gear, the base pitch can be described in either the transverse or normal plane, and is called the transverse base pitch (TBP) or normal base pitch (NBP), respectively. For parallel axis helical gears, both the TBP and NBP must be the same on both mating gears. For skew axis helical gears, only the NBP must be common.