Custom gear cutting is the process of machining or manufacturing gears specific to your unique requirements. Gears are essential elements of mechanical power transmission, and their precise manufacture required the development of intelligent tools and techniques.
The gearbox is essential for transferring rotary motion and power from one component to another and is often used in devices with a speed control mechanism.
Gears can be made by casting, stamping, machining, or powder metallurgy processes. Of all of these processes, cutting, broaching, milling, and grinding are the most common and accurate methods of making gears.
What is Gear Cutting?
A gear is a part of a rotating machine that has teeth cut or inserted teeth (gears) that mesh with another toothed part to transmit torque. Gear cutting refers to any machining process used to make gears, including carving, broaching, milling, and grinding. Forging, extrusion, casting, and other forming processes can precede the gear cutting. Many metal and plastic gears are manufactured without cutting, but the gearing is also an important industry.
Gears are usually made of metal. Although custom gear cutting is an important industry, many metal and plastic gears are manufactured without cutting using die-casting or injection molding processes. Some powder metallurgy metal gears require post-processing, while others are finished after sintering.
The old method of gear cutting is to mount a gear blank on a former and use a shaped tool to mill it onto the profile of the tooth to be machined. This process also works for cutting internal grooves. Another is a pinion mill that is used in gear forming machines. It’s basically when a router that looks like a gear cuts an empty gear. The milling cutter and blank must have a parallel axis of rotation. This procedure works well for both small and large production runs.
How To Cut Gears
Gears can be cut using various machining technologies; gear cutting is one of the common manufacturing processes for gears, including gear cutting processes, forming processes, and additive processes. Here are the specific cutting operations.
Broaching:
A machining process that uses a toothed tool to remove material to create the gear you want is suitable for cutting teeth on the inside. The most common broaching technology is linear or surface broaching. A vertical broaching machine is often used to make large gears or splines mounted to a vertical rail with a single tooth cutter to accurately and evenly shape the gear. However, the gear cutting machine is relatively expensive. Multiple brush bars are required for gears of different sizes, typically used in large production series or the manufacture of unique shapes.
Hobbing:
Use a countertop to cut the teeth into a blank continuously. In CNC hobbing machines, a master tabletop or index plate is generally used for the hobbing process; the milling cutter and gear blank are rotated simultaneously to transfer the profile from the worktop to the material blank. Due to its versatility and good productivity, the carving is suitable for all production sizes, especially for cutting helical and cylindrical gears.
Milling:
When using CNC milling services to cut gears, milling is a subtractive manufacturing method that uses a rotary cutter to remove materials from the blank, best for making gears with coarse pitch and spur gears. Form milling operations are commonly used to make spur gears.
Grinding:
Spur gears can also be ground on a jig grinding machine with a numbered gear cutter. Gear grinding isn’t a cutting operation, but it is an essential gear manufacturing process to finish a gear. Often used after heat treatment to remove excess material and achieve optimal gear quality.
Shaping:
An age-old gear cutting method involves mounting a blank on a roll forming machine, using a rack or pinion mill to create the tooth profile. The first modeling process works well for spur, herringbone, pinion, internal, and cluster gears. And the pinion grind is ideal for small and large series. Modeling can also be used to make bevel gears.
How Gears Are Manufactured
The process of cutting special gears and manufacturing gear replacements requires the highest level of precision in terms of shape and dimensional accuracy, especially in the edge zone properties of special gears.
Since damaging the edge zone will contribute to faster tooth wear and may result in the tooth of custom gears being easily broken and broken, the gear grinding process must be as accurate as possible. This ensures a perfect cut of these gears and the right fit in the customer’s machinery.
One of the precise processes in custom gear cutting is hobbing, a machining process for cutting chain wheels, grooves, and gears. It is effective for replacing ground gears and custom gears. The milling centers have an impressive selection of gear milling cutters, tools, and equipment that enable in-house custom gear manufacturing and external gear replacement.
The milling machine is used, for example, in the final production of unique gear wheels. The teeth or serrations of this machine are gradually cut into the gear through a series of cuts with a worktop (a cylindrically shaped cutting tool with oblique teeth). The gear cutter has two proportionally rotating shafts determined by the number of teeth on the gear blank. For instance, if the gear ratio is 40: 1, the worktop will rotate 40 times for each revolution of the blank, creating 40 teeth on the blank to create a custom gear.
Contact Us If You Are Looking For Gear Manufacturers In Brisbane
At TNN Engineering, we actually don’t offer in-house gear cutting, we offer gear machining.
However, we will machine a component, for example, a sprocket on the outside and a gear on the inside and then we will send it away to have the custom gear cut. We manage the whole gear manufacturing process for you, which makes it nice and easy.
A lot of the time gear manufacturers won’t do machining, they exclusively do gear cutting. So, being able to offer the complete component finished is an advantage of having us take care of your custom gear cutting.
If you need to cut custom gears, we can help you organise and get the right result as we understand the custom gear cutting process, and we also ensure that due diligence is done to give you a high-quality result.
