CNC Gears and CAM

[apples000]

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?