[Kevin Sevcik]

Ok, I keep hearing people saying that beveling BOTH gear faces helps with meshing. I'm assuming we're talking about chamfering the edge of the gear. Now, if we're talking about using beveled gears/miter gears/45 deg. gears, then just ignore the following post, cause it's based on a completely wrong assumption.

I understand how this would reduce wear on the gears by spreading it over a larger area. I fail to see how beveling both faces would help with meshing, however. I can see how it would intuitively seem that way, since beveling a hole and a shaft lets the shaft slide right in, but I think this is different.

The way I see it, gears meshing is all about getting the two gear cross-sectiobs to line up properly. By beveling both gears, you're merely enlarging the cross-sections that need to mesh. So unless there's friction going on to get the gears going closer to the same speed, I don't think beveling both gears actually helps.

That being said, I can see how beveling just one gear would help. By doing this, the straight gear must initially mesh with just a small part of the beveled gear. This would probably help, though the straight gear would get point ground off rather quickly. In addition, rounding off the edges of the meshing faces would probably help are well. Anything to change the initial cross sections that have to mesh.

This is, of course, all just theoretical, and based on my vision of how things should work, but it makes sense to me.