Gear Generator

[Anonymous]

I like the simplicity and intuitiveness of Fusion as it makes it very easy to use for those of us without a whole lot of previous CAD experience. I’m now crossing over from conventional subtractive machining to 3D printing and would like to see mechanical parts and surface finishing techniques available that can be directly accessed via menu (ie on on the Mac version of Fusion too) and not require scripts. I will enter a few suggestions separately for vote.

At the moment the only mechanical feature available in the create menu is “threads”. I would like to suggest a gear generator that can generate correctly modelled mechanical gears. Given that 3D printing isn’t limited by conventional gear manufacturing techniques, apart from simple spur gears I would like to see more complex gears available such as double herringbone, helical, worm, bevel (of various types), and racks. I would like both metric and imperial gears available and the menu to default to standard gear values with basic parameters eg Pressure Angle = 20 degrees, DP = 16, tooth N = 32 will produce a standard involute spur gear, however also have the option of changing some additional parameters to modify the gear geometry when that is required.

Gears follow relatively simple mathematical rules and I think this should be relatively straight forward to code and implement.

Thanks

[Anonymous]

Aaand, because I can't seem to edit my own post:

diametral pitch = pi / circular pitch.

[acrease]

What I found is that if I enter a diametral pitch 10 times the DP I actually want, it produces the correct size gear.

[Anonymous]

The latest Inventor version I've worked with is 2013, so I don't know what the most recent iteration of the design accelerator can do, but even though Inventor has it and SolidWorks for example does not, the Inventor 2013 Accelerator left much to be desired in terms of doing real engineering work.

I mostly just plugged in the appropriate values into their life calculator and used that, since the Accelerator mostly generated things for aesthetic purposes.

If Fusion had a REAL gear generator, which show the 'simulated' tooth profiles, but when doing sketches, detailed renderings, and simulation, used ACTUAL profiles, that would make it a huge step above the competition.  It's really not even that hard to do the real profiles, if you set up a sketch or API properly for the standard being used, it's extremely flexible with parameterization.  Obviously in an Accelerator this is all background stuff, but even custom profiles should be simple to incorporate into the Accelerator.  Make it flexible, make it simple, and please please please, make it simulate properly with REAL TOOTH PROFILES please!

Also allow the teeth to be added to already generated components as in the video, previous Inventor Accelerators did a lousy job of incorporating the teeth.  Largely this is because there was no easy way to get the accelerator to adjust parameters so that if you were off on a dimension by 0.00000000001mm that it would still 'cut' the gear teeth properly instead of saying 'no match found' or some such.

[Anonymous]

I would humbly request that a gear tool should also be able to generate pulleys for timing belts.

[roambotics_scott]

I'd not complain if it also included Synchromesh

[Anonymous]

I started this suggestion some time ago, and I guess somewhat unremarkably it seems to be receiving considerable support from the community. Given that it appeared the design team had an Alpha version of the feature pretty much ready to go, I'm a bit surprised that we haven't seen anything out yet in this regard. A couple of iterations of F360 seemed a bit buggy there for a while, so it could be that the team was kept busy plugging holes in the ****, but I do hope we'll see a really good gear generator coming out soon. I emphasise good, as this is a relatively simple opportunity for the team to really push F360 to a whole new level from an end-user's perspective and really set it apart from competitive products. Whether it's an involute, or other form of gear, they are based on "relatively" straight forward mathematical models, that means they should be easy to code (though not as easy as it is for me to say that!). From the straight spur gears, it should then be relatively straight forward to incorporate the derivatives of standard spur gears. Again, that's easy for me to say, but compared to some of the more fluid computations that go on behind the scenes, this is pocket calculator and slide rule stuff.

My most recent application, that I can't model in F360, are 0.8 Module gears for follow focus on cinenatography lenses. That 0.8 module is a standard for lenses, yet I'm SOL as far as modelling it, never mind printing it, with Fusion 360.

[HughesTooling]

If you're working in millimeters to get a 0.8 module gear from the script try this (25.4/0.8)/2.54 = 12.5. Enter 12.5 for the Diametral pitch. As a test I entered 12.5 pitch and 10 teeth give on OD of 9.6 that is number of teeth plus 2 * 0.8.

 When you measure the gear don't use the rad at the top of the tooth I don't know why but that rad is not concentric with the gear, measure across 2 corners. This only works with an even numer of teeth.

[Anonymous]

Interestingly the scripts weren't working in the Mac version previously, however now they indeed seem to be working. I will have a play with them and see how it goes. Maybe not ideal, but at least it's some progress, and could be an interim measure.

[Anonymous]

You support threads but not gears.  Right now I have to use an external tool and import it (which you don't make easy).

[roambotics_scott]

You're not alone there..

http://forums.autodesk.com/t5/ideastation-request-a-feature-or/gearing-tool/idi-p/4657023

https://forums.autodesk.com/t5/ideastation-request-a-feature-or/involute-gear-tooth-tool/idi-p/44163...

https://forums.autodesk.com/t5/ideastation-request-a-feature-or/gear-generator/idi-p/5598516

[and probably more]

[Anonymous]

BTW I work in metric and the scripts all come up for me in cm. I have no idea why or if it's possible to change it, but dress makers use centimetres. Engineers and machinists use millimetres 😉

[Anonymous]

Your improved script is working right, I spend more than 2 hours trying to understand what is DIAMETRAL PITCH in builtin spurgear script and it is still confused for me. I accpected DIAMETRAL PITCH is number of teeth in one inch or cm but it gives a wrong gear size.

So thank you very much @Anonymous for your improved script!

[Anonymous]

This idea is now one of the most voted ideas in the idea station yet to be implemented. Thank you for everyone who has voted on this, hopefully more people will continue to do so, and we will see this fully implemented soon.

[Anonymous]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eKdTTE4j8so&feature=youtu.be where is this feature?

[roambotics_scott]

This idea https://forums.autodesk.com/t5/ideastation-request-a-feature-or/gear-generator/idi-p/5598516 only got 92 votes.. maybe it didn't hit the threshold ?

[Anonymous]

are people at autodesk out of their minds? this is not something easy to just do on the fly so anything that cant be done quick and is part of a drive system should have a primitive as part of the design package,  and where da hell do we vote ? 

[roambotics_scott]

Tell me about it, @Anonymous

Doing a fully general tool for every possible type of gear would be a huge undertaking (though worth it), but they had this thing with a nice UI to do involute teeth (which would already cover a ton of use cases including the above, and it'd be a great place to start from and build toward more exotic gears), never released it, and, instead, gave us a super janky / almost useless script

Just for the record - I made those by a horrible kludge that involved Mathematica, importing into a sketch, doing a circular pattern, and a bunch of by-hand calculations, and ended up with something that was passable but almost certainly inferior to whatever that tool would have generated. 

[Anonymous]

pethetic really they want us to evolve this platform via feedback but do not take into consideration what us makers need in order to make this platform better then Solideworks which i see in youtube A LOT of videos on how to assemble from scratch including their primitives from their addon scripts.

ubt hey those gears look fancy to me, i would love to print those on my MKB REP2, i just did last night my first working Rack & Pinion and must say i think it works pretty good though i must admid i made it kinda small because i did not want to waste PLA on something that might not work so because of that the pitch of the gear did not came out as clean as the CAD design but hey not bad for not using a funny script tool