Thread: CNC Gears and CAM
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Unread 17-04-2014, 22:10
Alan Ing Alan Ing is offline
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Re: CNC Gears and CAM
Quote:
Originally Posted by apples000 View Post
This year, for our rotating arm, our team needed a 17 tooth 20 DP gear, so I cut them, on a bridgeport, using an involute gear cutter we had laying around. I made 3 2 inch long gears and parted off individual gears on the lathe. This worked really well, and was way cheaper than buying gears, so our team is spending time this offseason to find a way to make cheap gears.

Making the gears was unimaginably time consuming and boring, especially on a mill without a DRO, so we wanted to do the same thing, but with a 4th axis on a CNC machine (which we have). We have no idea where to start with generating the g-code with this in MasterCAM. Has anybody found a way to do this, or are we better off writing the gcode ourselves?

Our second question deals with the actual cutting. We've found that with our CNC machine (it's a Tormach) some of the more aggressive cuts that work just fine on our bridgeport result in a lot of screeching from the whole machine just warping and being sloppy. It's not nearly as rigid as our bridgeport. I can actually do climb milling (which probably isn't a great idea) on a bridgeport faster and at a larger depth than we can on our CNC, so I'm kind of worried that the involute cutter won't work so well cutting steel gears. Could we make aluminum ones with the same cutter?

Cutting gears with a Tormach and a 4th axis should be fairly easy without having to go into mastercam. The Tormach comes with some preset wizards which are accessible from the control panel. I can't remember what its exactly called, but it probably is named "gear wizard". Just enter the parameters, upload the generated g-code and mount your 4th axis. Cutting aluminum gears is easier than steel using the same cutter. We actually cut gears using a diy homemade gear hobbing attachment for our Bridgeport style vertical mill. It's much faster than cutting the gear on our Tormach as we rotate the gear blank while cutting all the teeth a little at a time. Since you have the Tormach and a 4th axis, I would just use that as it should be easy to set up and run.

Alan