Registering stacked gears

[John T]

Hi Art,
When I'm cutting gears I have no significa nt with gears up to 3/8" thick.  From this thickness up to 1" thick, which is as thick as I go I have lots of problems with the end mill binding in the repeated passes.  I usually use a pass depth of 0.07".  I get a nice smooth tooth face and all that its just keeping the canal spotless clean so there is no binding. 

One of the ways that I often do to eliminate the problem is cut multiple gears from 1/4" stock and then stack them together.  This works quite well but there is another technique that improves the stacking alignment and that is to drill dowel alignment holes in the rim of the gear, usually 1/8" diameter.  Would it be possible to include alignment dowels in the program?  Since an array of holes on a circle would also allow me to make pins for a pin wheel escapemen t the idea of holes on the rim would be really useful for me.  If the number of alignment holes could be varied from 2 to 30 the addition to the program could be used for both alignment and making a pinwheel escapemen t.

Hope this is understan dable

[ArtF]

John:

  Yup, I understan d what you mean.  Ill add it to my list. Im currently working on separatin g out 1 tooth in proper order form the array
into its own array so I can generate a tooth shape for tooling.

   What you can do for now, is generate a cage gear of the appropria te diameter, with the right number of holes.. Gcode that and remove the outside cutout from the code. If you now run that file after cutting a gear, youll get all the holes in the right position. Since I always use 0,0 as center, that should work very well.  You just need to figure out the diamter of the cagegear to coincide with the center of the rim..
 
Art

[John T]

That'll work - Thanks