Issues of Gear Design Using 3D Solid Modeling Systems

More and more gear shops are wrestling with the issue of whether or not solid modeling is right for their gear design work. The Q & A Page of The Gear Industry Home Page has had numerous questions asking how to model gears in solid modeling applications such as AutoCAD, Solidworks and Pr/Engineer. Given the problems people have been having, we are presenting the step-by-step process for modeling gears in Pr/Engineer, but first we thought it would be a good idea to explore the question of whether or not you should even try to design gears using Pro/Engineer or any other 3D solid modeling program.