Making Time to Work on Your Business
I’ve been involved in manufacturing since I was in high school when I was working part time at my family’s gear business. Since then,...
How To Find Qualified Employees
Wouldn’t it be great if when you needed to hire some employees, you put an advertisement in the paper and 100 qualified candidates lined...
Buying Used Equipment: Do’s and Don’ts
For those of you who didn’t attend the recent American Gear Manufacturers Association (AGMA) annual meeting, you missed a great opportunity to network and...
Protecting Critical Infrastructure
Information is the most valuable commodity any company has. Whether it is held in a persons mind, a cabinet, or a computer, the information...
Looking at a Print
Gears are hard to make. They come in all shapes and sizes and are made out of a variety of materials. Our customers dream...
Dealing with Parts Rejection
You got the call or the email, or maybe the box just showed up. One of your customers rejected some parts. The box winds...
Executing a Quality Product
As a former owner of a mid-sized gear manufacturing facility, I understand the pressures that owners and their staffs endure to satisfy their customers....
Preliminary Results of Testing of Low-Tooth-Count Bevel Gears of a Novel Design, Part III
For the manufacturing purpose, a simplified approach can be used for the development of the CAD models of the gear and the pinion in...
Preliminary Results of Testing of Low-Tooth-Count Bevel Gears of a Novel Design, Part II
In the proposed approach, the tooth flanks of the gear, G, and the pinion, P, are generated by means of a desirable line of...
Preliminary Results of Testing of Low-Tooth-Count Bevel Gears of a Novel Design, Part I
In a general sense, LTC bevel gears feature the start-of-active-profile cone angle, ϒl, smaller than the base cone angle, ϒb, of the gear. For...
Tool Coatings and Dry Cutting
There has been a movement in recent years to dispense with the use of coolants in gear cutting. This has been normal practice in...
The Pressed Blank: A Closer Look
Carbide
Carbide is the basis for most cutting tools used today in non-gear cutting applications. It has been in use approximately 50 years. It cannot...
High-Speed Steel
To be effective in cutting a gear, a cutting tool material must have a combination of the following qualities:
• Durability: The ability to withstand—to...
Controlling Profile, Lead, and Spacing
This column marks the end of a three-part discussion on control of the three basic elements: profile, lead, and spacing. Figure 1 depicts three...
Accuracy of Profile, Lead, and Spacing
Noise
The primary cause of gear noise is the number of teeth in the gear and the contact ratio of the given set. These are...
Modifications in Pre-Finished Gears
Profile: These modifications are made to accommodate the characteristics of the finishing process. (Figure 1a)
Chamfer: The Chamfer is meant to protect the tip of...
Proper Spur and Helical Gear Inspection
In last month's Tooth Tips, we studied finished and pre-finished gears, along with their profiles. Let's move on to some more definitions useful in...
Principles of Gear Inspection
Over the next few editions of this column, I’d like to provide an understanding of the principles of gear inspection as they apply to...
Pitch and Pressure-Angle Changes
The engineer has the responsibility for the design of an involute gear set, and the tools that are used to cut the teeth in...
Using the Proper Computational Tool
As a practical matter, audible gear noise is subject to a tortuous path from the gear mesh to the ear. From a meshing gear...
