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On Team 824, we experimented with cutting our own gears. The logic here is that a complete set of involute gear cutters for a specific DP would be a cheap investment over 2 or more competition seasons as opposed to buying new gears every year.
We can cut aluminum gears okay, but I made the decision to just go with store bought gears this year. The technology is new enough such that I don't want to deploy it into the field without extensive testing. We can probably cut steel (and possibly even titanium) gears with our setup, but there would need to be some extensive modification to the machine, namely to get high torque at low RPM that these materials cut best at.
We used a Sherline CNC setup with some custom tooling that myself and some of my high school students made. We will probably put out a white paper on this after the competition.
-=- Terence
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