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

[roambotics_scott]

Nice rack-n-pinon ! 

Mine are injecion molded Delrin.. not nearly as cheap or fast, but much easier to get the dimensions right on (and they're still not perfect / much noisier / higher friction than I'd like)

FWIW, IDK but strongly suspect their hearts are in the right place and they just don't have a great compass to tell them what to focus on.. really gets to the reason that things shouldn't be left to the peanut gallery anyway (even if they were which clearly they're not)

[O.Tan]

Aaah, and don't forget, Bolted Connections! They actually shown some nice ongoing work but somehow it got axed out and nobody from AD replies this question when I asked them. 

[madengineer13]

 I know this might be pie in the sky,  But I would love a feature that would take a sketch shape and sweep it through an involute path, basically making custom gear profiles from any (or nearly any)  sketch shape. does anyone else think that would be usefull?

[jeanfabre]

Hi,

I struggled a lot with this, and I think what's important is to understand the conversions for pitches, and so this link below was how I could make it all work in the end.

http://www.engineersedge.com/gear_pitch_chart.htm

Thanks,

 Jean

[JBerns]

I discovered that the spur gear creation tool has moved to Add-Ins > Scripts & Add-Ins > SpurGears.

Still not as complete as the Design Accelerators in Inventor. I hope this will improve with time.

Regards,

Jerry 

[roambotics_scott]

That'd be the «super janky / almost useless script»

[promm]

For internal use, combined with another idea FUS-25381

[Anonymous]

Please provide a simple gear generator in which one can edit all the parameters. Outside diameter, pitch angle, number of teeth, thickness. tooth depth. The script is difficult to use when trying to get a simple gear to be a certain size.

[roambotics_scott]

Pretty sure the script is also useless if you want to do something like a herringbone or anything other than just a circular one with involute teeth

[etfrench]

The script also fails to generate correct sized spur gears. Module .8 gears created with the script are significantly different than gears created with Gearotic.

[roambotics_scott]

Even if it actually worked perfectly, it's very clunky and doesn't fit well with the application's intuitiveness or usability

[Anonymous]

I have released a gear generation program what will generate spur gears, internal gears and rack and pinions.  If there is interest, I can look at the other gears discussed in the thread.

This is the Gear Bakery Page

[michaelteeuw]

Looking forward to this feature sooo much! The scripts don't support parametric design since the generated gears will not change after modifying the parameters. It would be awesome if this feature can be implemented just like the thread feature... Thanks!

[Anonymous]

Gears of all types are often used but are difficult - our CAD Systems should address the most difficult problem and Gears should be extensively addressed. This should not be left to third parties. Please start to implement all gear forms, to include to all Gear forms, Splines ( while not a gear it is a similar problem ), Planetary gears, Sprockets, etc.

Our CAD systems should address the difficult and or Time consuming problems.

Jim Mahoney.

[roambotics_scott]

+185 http://forums.autodesk.com/t5/ideastation-request-a-feature-or/gear-generator/idi-p/5598516

[Anonymous]

Thumbs up for this one! Hope to get it soon.

When implementing automatic gear generation, please consider alignment of gears carefully. Now trying to do for 2 step planetary gear (based on Doug Roger's GearBakery (thanks!) http://dougrogers.blogspot.be/2016/08/gear-bakery-10-port-of-dr-rainer.html). Alignment of individual planets with 2 pitch diameters should be intuitive. See the attached picture.

BR,
Tomas

PS: is there a way to submit test cases when new idea's are considered? It would make sense to have a "subvote" mechanism which applications are priority/how to confirm the implementation.

[Anonymous]

The problems with making this gear generator is that not everyone will be entirely happy. 

There are sooo many parameters to get a gear work. And we start talking about pairing several gears like a gearbox with fixed axle distances and and ratios. 

The thing is, gears are really complicated and you can do a pair of gears in a lot of different ways. 

Then we have such things that are interesting to me like backlash, tip relief, profile crowning, length crowning. 

I guess we have to see this to what it is and realize it is just for prototype or "good looks".

Unless Fusion team decides to implement gear tests with stress and tension on two gears. Then **** i am interested. Haha

[Anonymous]

@Anonymous Gears are in fact VERY straightforward and follow predictable and repeatable mathematical models. This should be an absolute no-brainer to implement, particularly since there was a demonstrated Alpha development at the time. The original suggestion, made almost two years ago, was for a simple gear generator of STANDARD gears. ie regular module/DP involute gears, etc. How those gears are made to interface with each other is up to the user. Modifications to the gears outside their standard parameters is also outside the needs or interests of the request, and would be a case for a specialist program specific for that need.

[roambotics_scott]

There is no need to launch this with support for every sort of herringbone / strain-wave gearing system.

There was a demo I don't even know in something like 2014 of a builtin spur gear tool. That alone generating involute teeth outside and inside of cylinders with standard parameters would cover most people's needs and would be much better than some kludgy non-timeline aware plugin.

Once that's done, build out to cover more and more uses adding cycloid teeth and conical gears and helical / herring bone / etc.

Unlike sheet metal, that's relatively low hanging fruit and needn't be a huge interminable project

[Anonymous]

@roambotics_scott Yes exactly, we're not talking some bespoke depthing operation of a virtual timepiece here, just simple everyday involute gears that surround us everywhere. It wouldn't take much at all to incorporate helical gears, as that is a relatively straight forward mathematical change. If it allows the face to be varied, you've then ticked off bevel gears, and worms should be able to be covered from the threads op. With that basic package you've covered a huge segment of the market's needs.

This idea is now the second most popular not yet implemented and I'm continually surprised that, given a demo was shown all that time ago, this still hasn't been implemented. As was pointed out, this is very low hanging fruit.