Cutting Tetrix gears

[Cory]

Originally Posted by asid61

Yes, I have seen that, and I really want to buy it, but the only site the castings are available from is in the UK and the thing is expensive enough already.

A CNC hobber is called "CNC mill + automatic indexer", I believe. To my knowledge (a few weeks of on-off research) nobody has made a dedicated CNC hobber, although it should be easy to set up if you already have a CNC mill.

If you Google "cnc gear hobber" you'll find tons of examples. Not the same as a cnc mill with 4th axis at all. A gear hobber has to vary the angle the hob is presented to the work at in order to make different kinds of gears.

When not done on a dedicated hobbing machine, hobbing mostly occurs on y-axis equipped cnc lathes, minus some homebrew setups people have built with mills. I know 368 at one point had setup their mill to hob sprockets. I think there were pics on here somewhere, but you need to mechanically slave the rotary axis to the spindle.