I've created a lot of 3D printed gears over the last few years and one of the best tools I've found is from Rainer Hessmer.<p><a href="http://hessmer.org/gears/InvoluteSpurGearBuilder.html" rel="nofollow">http://hessmer.org/gears/InvoluteSpurGearBuilder.html</a><p>It allows you to specify additional parameters like backlash, clearance, and profile shift. It also allows you to output in DXF which tends to be more of a standard in the engineering world.
Looks fantastic, and was seriously fun to fiddle a bit with.<p>One bug though: you can't back out from the site, the history is flooded with geargenerator.com addresses. Had to close the tab (Firefox 40.0.3 on Windows).
The best part of this is that you can output the gears as SVGs. For example, gear + Glowforge =
<a href="http://community.glowforge.com/t/gears/143/4" rel="nofollow">http://community.glowforge.com/t/gears/143/4</a>
This is majestic.<p>I've been battling with making my own gears in Modo for a while (the inbuilt primitive scales the teeth size as well as number of teeth)<p>However this allows me to create ratios <i>AND</i> test them at the same time. This is invaluable.<p>When I get time I shall be using this for my laser cuttings.
One thing I'm wondering about: do opposing gears always need to have the same form for the teeth? Also, what are the constraints that lead to the form of the teeth? I can imagine that one constraint is that the teeth must "roll" onto each other. But are there more constraints?
Here s a referral link you can use to get 100$ off, im super stoked on this!! :) <a href="http://glowforge.com/referred/?kid=kmrbvD" rel="nofollow">http://glowforge.com/referred/?kid=kmrbvD</a>
Is that correct? The tip of the gear tooth seems to rub up against the other as it approaches. Shouldn't there be a small clearance there? or is there?<p>Also, is there a way to export to a format that can be loaded into SolveSpace?