Cutting gears

[bryan henderson]

Good morning creekers

Is there any program out there (free) that you can draw gears that can mesh with each other, that you can cut out of wood?

Bryan

[Joe Hillmann]

http://woodgears.ca/gear_cutting/template.html

It does a pretty good job, to make two gears of different size leave all the numbers the same except the number of teeth. Once you have the gears you want click the download HGPL and it should automatically open up the gear in corel draw. Once you are in coral draw you can re-size them till they are the size you need as long as you re-size them together or by the same percentage.



If you are only doing a few gears they will work right out of the laser but if you are doing a larger gear train or stacked gears you will have to sand each side of each tooth of each gear(Just one or two strokes with 400 grit paper works wonders) and you may have to lube the teeth as well. I built an orrery and used beeswax chap stick and it worked pretty well to keep it running smoothly.

[Neal Schlee]

Gearotic has a free demo...$75 for the non crippled version.
It's very cool software written by Art, the creator of the popular Mach3 CNC software.
http://www.gearotic.com/

Neal
Lasertech Alaska

[Ken Shea]

Ditto on Neal's Gearotic suggestion, it also now has the ability to make clock escapements. Art is also has a laser that he is making a demo clock from.