Gears, Chains, belts ....
i am working in a factory(since 1 month ago). i am asked to model and design different types of Gears and pulleys. finally i found the a SW plugin which is called GearTrax. does any one knows a concise reference to know about these and to work with this plugin?
DO NOT compromise on gear tooth geometry. I've seen entire product lines fail due to this.
I got to watch two entire rooms of a three story proton therapy facility nearly shake itself apart because the original designer and builder thought that teeth developed from a CAD program and cut on a wire machine were "good enough". Rotating 150K lbs is not a pretty sight when done on over hardened, undersized and poorly designed and manufactured gear sets. The occasional tooth turning into a bullet was sadly not uncommon.
Designing the "Rework" was a whole lot of fun though...
If you have GearTrax, you can get to their help. There may be some information on line (although I have never investigated). As Roland Schwarz stated, the geometry is good. I believe there are three settings for accuracy (I am not on my work computer at the moment). I only use the default because we cut our gears with hobs (right now) and do not manufacture from the model (although we do cut our sprockets using the GearTrax profile and have not had any issues I have heard of). Also, their support is very good. When I was trying to understand how to make nonstandard gears with the program they were most helpful. You can always email Camnetics, I would be surprised they could not answer all your questions.
i need a manual book to teach how to work with this software and which parameters can and should be changed and which ones not. in fact need a summarized GearTrax-oriented gear-design course!
Have you purchased GearTrax? For standard gears you just enter pitch, number of teeth and pressure angle; software does the rest. For non-standard applications, to me, what you are looking for is a book on gear design? Internet has many sites to get you start.
if so , can you please share one? or link of one...i dont need a 300 pages book, just 20 pages booklet to teach the guidelines and how to use the sofware. for example what you have written is great, this :
" For standard gears you just enter pitch, number of teeth and pressure angle; software does the rest."
i need such directions...
If you have the software then post what kind of gear you want to make (I only have created spur gears) and I will try and put some instructions together.
Meysam,
1. Most people do not need perfectly detailed gears for their solid models. A good rule of thumb in 3D modeling is to not put in more detail than is required. Gears are manufactured from the specifications rather than by feeding a solid model to a CAM package.)
2. DO NOT use the gears in the SWX Toolbox. They are not even a good crude representation of a gear.
3. Many times you can download a gear from a vendor website. Even if it is a dumb solid, if it has the correct tooth profile you can edit the file into your finished gear.
4. If you truly must have a good parametric model of a gear then you MUST learn the gear parameters in order to fully understand them and how they interrelate. There is a lot of good information online, but I highly suggest you start with reading about gears in The Machinery's Handbook. https://www.amazon.com/Machinerys-Handbook
5. If metric spur gears is all you need then attached here is a good parametric model you can use. It has all the equations in a Design Table. Just edit the DT and change the values of Pressure Angle, Teeth, and Module in the green columns to get the particular gear you need.
Have you design anything before?
First how much do you know about gear?
Do you know how to design a gear? Module, Pitch, PD, ratio, pressure angle, helix, clearance?
You need to design a gear so you can make one?
Or design gear and pulley mechanism for machine?
You can make gears in SW without GearTrax. Learn to make an involute from equation-driven curves and you're on your way. Look up "involute" on Wikipedia and the equations are there.
DO NOT compromise on gear tooth geometry. I've seen entire product lines fail due to this.
I investigated GearTrax about ten years ago. I compared their output to a true mathematical model of an involute gear tooth. The geometry was good. I'm sure they've only gotten better since.