Determining tooth thickness of various gear types – Part II

In order to determine the tooth size of a gear after taking into account the backlash allowance, you first must determine what the nominal...

Determining tooth thickness of various gear types

In order to determine the tooth size of a gear after taking into account the backlash allowance, you first must determine what the nominal...

What is a standard anyway?

There is an old adage that goes: “Everything old is new again.” This is commonly used when a fad — like bell-bottom blue jeans...

Understanding dimensional stability in gearing

In the retail community, the term shrinkage is defined as the difference between the value of the physical on-hand inventory minus the expected on-hand...

Crossed helical gearing a.k.a. screw gears

A common refrain from my childhood was “if you keep crossing your eyes, they are going to get stuck like that!” It never did...

Internal ring gears – design and considerations 

When one is under a great deal of stress, they have a choice to either internalize the stress or to express it. Some express...

Gear mesh and tooth modifications 

As we march through this thing that we all call life, we look to find our perfect partner — that singular person that perfectly...

What is a gear engineer?

When you are a young person, perhaps 4 or 5 years old, someone might ask, “What would you like to be when you grow...

What do you do? I sell gears!

This year, my 11-year-old daughter asked me to be one of the parents who presented their profession on career day. She is very proud...

Standards in terminology for bevel gearing

If you still are digesting the acronyms in my April 2019 column, I apologize. As mentioned in that article, without a proper understanding of...

I graduated; now I am an engineer!?!

In my previous columns, I tried to connect real-world experiences with concepts of gearing in order to entertain and educate you, the reader. In...

Achieving zero-backlash worm-gear pairs

Life is full of opposing views. If you are heading to the beach, then you want to have the “perfect” beach body. This requires...

Standards in terminology for gearing

LOL, BRB, and LMAO are some of the terms that you might text to your teenager if you want to seem cool with their...

Parallelism, perpendicularity, and misalignment

Sometime around your 12th birthday, the trip to the dentist resulted in a discussion about the misalignment of your teeth and the need to...

Heat-treating gears improves surface durability

A common question asked of gear manufacturers by their potential customer is, “Is this gear strong enough for my application?” Without qualifiers, this question...

When someone gives you the shaft

Did you ever have someone “give you the shaft”? This insult is defined as ignoring or putting someone down. In gearing, giving you the...

The key to a proper fit for keyways

Did you ever have someone tell you that you cannot fit a square peg into a round hole? This common phrase is misleading because...

Tolerances associated with gears

Have you ever purchased something that cautioned, “Some assembly required” on the packaging, only to learn later that even with a master’s degree in...

The benefits of converting to helical gearing

The simplest-to-design and the easiest-to-use gearing design is that of the spur gear. It has teeth that are parallel to the shaft axis, and...

A primer on backlash, its purpose in gear designs

If gears are designed with a standard tooth proportion and are operating on a standard center distance, they would mesh ideally and would neither...