Bourn & Koch provides retrofit Fellows 10-4 machine for gear shaping.

Automotive gear manufacturers have implemented significant improvements in external planetary gear manufacturing yielding quieter gears. In addition, process stability has increased due to the post-heat treatment finishing processes employed. This article explains various complete solutions for cutting and finishing internal ring gears.

Forest City Gear applies advanced gear shaping and inspection technologies to help solve difficult lead crown correction challenges half a world away. But these solutions can also benefit customers much closer to home, the company says. Here's how…

Our experts discuss runout and helix accuracy, as well as the maximum number of teeth in a shaper cutter.

Fred Young, CEO of Forest City Gear, talks about sophisticated gear manufacturing methods and how they can help solve common gear-related problems.

Economic production is one of the main concerns of any manufacturing facility. In recent years, cost increases and tougher statutory requirements have increasingly made cutting fluids a problematic manufacturing and cost factor in metalworking. Depending on the cutting fluid, production process and supply unit, cutting-fluid costs may account for up to 16% of workpiece cost. In some cases, they exceed tool cost by many times (Ref. 1). The response by manufacturers is to demand techniques for dry machining (Ref. 2).

Increased productivity in roughing operations for gear cutting depends mainly on lower production costs in the hobbing process. In addition, certain gears can be manufactured by shaping, which also needs to be taken into account in the search for a more cost-effective form of production.

Product announcements so often trumpet minor, incremental advances with works like "revolutionary" and "unique" that even the best thesaurus can fail to offer a fresh alternative to alert the reader when something really innovative and important is introduced. In the case of Mitsubishi's new CNC gear shaper, the ST25CNC, both terms apply.

A gear shaper cutter is actually a gear with relieved cutting edges and increased addendum for providing clearance in the root of the gear being cut. The maximum outside diameter of such a cutter is limited to the diameter at which the teeth become pointed. The minimum diameter occurs when the outside diameter of the cutter and the base circle are the same. Those theoretical extremes, coupled with the side clearance, which is normally 2 degrees for coarse pitch cutters an d1.5 degrees for cutters approximately 24-pitch and finer, will determine the theoretical face width of a cutter.

In the process of developing gear trains, it occasionally occurs that the tip of one gear will drag in the fillet of the mating gear. The first reaction may be to assume that the outside diameter of the gear is too large. This article is intended to show that although the gear dimensions follow AGMA guidelines, if the gear is cut with a shaper, the cutting process may not provide sufficient relief in the fillet area and be the cause of the interference.