GearHeads Corner

Some small gears printed.
I am not a cleaver person but the gear program has made it so easy for me to print the gears.

Thank You

Nice!  Like that 3 lobed shaft, no chance of slipping with that.  Did you edit the gear with a CAD program to get it?  What's the motor, doesn't look like a stepper?

I'd like to see the finished device, when you get there.

Kirk

Hi Kirk

Didn't use a cad program,being quite a simple person to be honest I would not know where to start with CAD. It took me a while how to figure out how to do the shape for the shaft, the motor also has a "D" shape on the shaft. All I done was export from gearotic in DFX, opened in corel draw and made the changes and exported from corel in SVG. Import into Auto desk 123 D as a svg sketch and extrude to the height I wanted, took me almost 2 days to figure that one out, I am starting to take a dislike to STL files they are so unmanageable. The motor is a micro metal gear motor with a 286:1 ratio.
The finished product is going to be a few months way, mainly because I do not have a clue  to what I am doing, it is all guess work! To get them two tiny gears I have made dozens of them in different sizes/ratios the main problem coming from the motor producing so much torque that it was breaking the gears when putting the output into stall. With the size of the gears now it breaks the motor on stall which will be controlled by a overload circuit on the electronics side later down the road.
My next hurdle is to make a set of crown gears which I was hoping to do with straight toothed gears but I don't see a way of doing that with gearotic so I have been trying with bevel gears, as I am typing this my 3d printer has just finished printing some bevel gears that look like they will work (been trying different ones all weekend!) and I have been having major problems in outputting bevel gears in stl (although I have found a easy work around for that now after another two days of sheer hell!) so that makes me very happy just coming up to midnight here in the UK and another major hurdle overcome.............that calls for a little drinky!

Sounds more like time for a big drinky instead of a little one :)

123D design should be able to handle all the mods for the lobed shaft based on a quick look, I'll qualify that by it's on my todo list but I've never used it.  I'd have probably used 100% infill and a dremel or round file, but design was more organic when I studied it.  We used organic wood tools, with dark marking cores, not this new fangled computer stuff.

For the D shaped shaft, use a round hole and a setscrew that hits the flat.  Drill a hole in the collar for it.  I think screw holes for collars were somewhere on Art's very long list, but I'd trade them for webcamed faces (not sure about eyeballs).

Yeah, stl is not a great format, don't understand how it became so popular.

Kirk

Awesome.. I love it!.
  Makes me feel good to see gearotric put to such good use..
(Might have to steal that 3 lobed thing... :) )

Art

Art
The 3 lobbed profile is for the tilt rod on a vertical blind.
Is there anyway to generate a set of crown gears with gearotic?

Hi:

  Crown gears cannot be made as yet, I didnt see a way to easily construct them..
They are on my lengthening list though...

Art

BBlinds wrote:the main problem coming from the motor producing so much torque that it was breaking the gears when putting the output into stall. With the size of the gears now it breaks the motor on stall which will be controlled by a overload circuit on the electronics side later down the road

Missed this the first time around.  Have you considered using a magnetic clutch?  Take the wheel from a caged gear, make two of them, fill the holes with those super strength tiny magnets, and adjust the number of magnets until it starts slipping where you need it to.  Iirc Art made one of these quite some time ago.

Kirk

Kirk

Nice idea but not enough space!

John

Nice work.