Sometimes in the pressure to meet deadlines and handle the Crisis of the Day, we lose sight of the forest for the trees. As a partial cure for this syndrome, I recently reviewed the six interviews with gear industry leaders that have appeared in our pages during the last year, trying to get a grasp of a larger picture. It struck me with renewed force how six men, each with a lifetime of experience in this business, see the gear industry forest the same way.
Trade shows can be exhausting.
You work hard all day, meeting people, wheeling and dealing, walking the aisles. After a long day of working the show, sometimes you just need to relax for awhile. With Gear Expo '95 fast approaching. Gear Technology has gone ahead and done some of the legwork for you. We've come up with some placed to go and things to do that have absolutely nothing to do with gears.
Ready or not, QS-9000 is here. If you are a first-tier supplier to one of the Big Three automotive companies, you've already heard that compliance with this new quality standard is now an entry-level requirement for doing business with Ford, General Motors and Chrysler. If you're a second-or third-tier supplier, you can expect the ripple effect of this new standard to hit your company one way or another.
Gear Technology speaks with David Goodfellow, president of American Pfauter, L.P., and Pfauter-Maag Cutting tools, L.P., to get his impressions about the state of the gear industry and its prospects for the future.
Introducing backlash into spline couplings has been common practice in order to provide for component eccentric and angular misalignment. The method presented here is believed to be exact for splines with even numbers of teeth and approximate for those with odd numbers of teeth. This method is based on the reduction of the maximum effective tooth thickness to achieve the necessary clearance. Other methods, such as tooth crowning, are also effective.
Gears are manufactured with thin rims for several reasons. Steel gears are manufactured with thin rims and webs where low weight is important. Nonmetallic gears, manufactured by injection molding, are designed with thin rims as part of the general design rule to maintain uniform thickness to ensure even post-mold cooling. When a thin-rimmed gear fails, the fracture is thought the root of the gear, as shown in Fig. 1a, rather than the usual fillet failure shown in Fig. 1b.
Your Addendum team has come across a number of Good Ole Boys in its time; now we bring you something of even more interest - a Good Ole Gear Book. Mr. Robert Price, of Automation - Gears - Machinery, a gear consulting firm in Delanson, NY, shared with us a real find.