What is your favorite method for attaching gears to shafts?

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Posted by Michael Ciavaglia at 05/01/2001 7:40 AM EST


Engineer on team #47, Chief Delphi, from Pontiac Central High School and Delphi Interior Systems.


In Reply to: double-d with tight press fit
Posted by Joe Johnson on 04/30/2001 4:48 PM EST:



Joe mentioned using a shaft with a flange welded to it with the sprocket or gear screwed to it. Another advantage is that the flange and sprocket can be dissimilar metals (i.e. steel and aluminum). We made aluminum sprockets for weight savings but NEEDED a steel shaft to support the loads.

We did have some difficulties at first. One word to the wise, get the bolt pattern out far enough so the load on the bolts is minimized and there is enough room to tighten the bolts, should they ever come loose .

Mike C... iavaglia

P.S. If it were easy everyone would do it.


: One final thing, we have also had good success with a bolt on design where flanges are welded to the shafts and then gears or sprockets are bolted to the flange. As long as we have done our homework on picking the right number of bolts to use and provided that we used the shaft itself to center the gear on the shaft (rather than using the bolt pattern to hold the center to center alignment -- not a great idea) we have had a fair amount of success. One nice thing this does for you is that you can change gear ratios without having to change the entire shaft.