Cutting my first gear

[Dan Rowe]

Steam or Diesel?

Dave
Mostly diesel on low speed Sulzer engines.

Thanks for uploading that book some interesting stuff including the thin bevel cutter method I mentioned and skew bevel gear theory. I checked the publication date and it is 1915 which is a year before the formation of the AGMA (American Gear Manufacturing Association). This is fine by me as all most all the Shay gears were designed before the AGMA so they were not standard gears.

Bilgram's machine is mentioned but no good picture of one of the machines. The machine invented by James Gleason which is what is used today is also mentioned. Template bevel gear planers were perfected in the US by William Gleason the father of James and they are mentioned in the text.

There were machines whose only purpose was to make the templates for template planners. This method was made obsolete by the Bilgram machine (1885) which is essentially an attachment for a shaper to generate bevel gears. James Gleason invented a machine (1905) that uses rotary cutters that are stationary and the gear blank moves that made the slower Bilgram machine obsolete.

Dan

 

[Dan Rowe]

Brian,
I started a thread about the Bilgram bevel gear shaper.
http://www.homemodelenginemachinist.com/index.php?topic=9759.msg107096

You will see that my first expermental gear did not come out as good as your gear. Sometimes a do-over is required.

Dan

 

[Captain Jerry]

As long as we are posting failures, here's mine:

This is the start of a non-90 degree bevel gear. Cut three spaces, phone rings, deal with it, return to gear making, screw it up. Due to loss of concentration, the blank was advanced in the wrong direction. The cutter crashed into the hardened capscrew holding the blank on the mandrel. The cutting edge was wrecked, the set up moved. I knew I was dead. I would never get the cutter reground and the set up restored. So I started another pass, just to see how bad it was.

If you look closely at the first three passes, you may be able to see tapered teeth, with a pretty good profile on the outer edge. That's a steel blank. I'll try again tomorrow.

Jerry