Creating Ridges/Gears

[Anonymous]

Hi guys,

I was wondering if any of you guys know how to create ridges/gears. What I'm trying to make is like the ridges from the outside of a coke bottle cap. That way, I can move this piece using a small motor.

[mstrater]

I would suggest starting with the spur gear script as shown below.

[Anonymous]

how do you scale down the gear? I tried to do that but the gear was too big. I am trying to make something that's around 5cm in diameter only

[mstrater]

You can adjust the size with the "Module" parameter in the script.

The Module value is the Pitch Diameter divided by the number of teeth.

So if you want a gear with 10 teeth and a pitch diameter of 50mm, you'd set "Module" to 5.

[Anonymous]

Thanks for the help! I have another question. I want to create 2 gears (Larger with 24 teeth and smaller with 8 teeth) that will fit together in an L shape. Do you have any advice/tips on how to do this so they fit perfectly?

[mstrater]

I don't have a background in mechanical engineering, so I can't really give you much advice. That said, it sounds like you might be looking to make a bevel gear (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bevel_gear).

If I was to try to model them, I would start by creating single gear tooth with a tapered thickness and tapered height. Then I would make a circular pattern of it so the teeth would lie on the surface of a 45 degree cone shape. Then I'd fill in the rest of the space with a revolve.

Then the challenge would be to make the 2 gears correctly fit together. My assumption is that to get it to work the second gear should have the same spacing between the teeth as the previous gear. This should be possible by ensuring that they both have the same ratio of circumference to number of teeth.

That would be my general idea, but again, I don't have any professional experience in the area so please don't use this for anything important. Hopefully someone more knowledgeable can come by and provide better advice.

[mstrater]

I also found this add-in that might be helpful: https://apps.autodesk.com/FUSION/en/Detail/Index?id=2791960362914790676

I haven't tried it, but it looks promising. Best of luck!

[Anonymous]

Thanks for the help! The Bevel Gear Add-in seems perfectly for what I need. When I tried to download it and open it in fusion360, for some reason the addin doesn't open and all I get is the message "hello bevel". Do you know what I did wrong?

[mstrater · Accepted solution]

I was able to get it working with these steps:

1. Download the addin from https://apps.autodesk.com/FUSION/en/Detail/Index?id=2791960362914790676 (note that it only works in Windows)

2. Double click the downloaded file while Fusion is closed.

3. Start Fusion and ensure that the add-in is running in the addins menu. It was running by default for me. It should have a little circle of dots to show that it's running.

4. Select the "Create Bevel gear" option from the bottom of the sketch menu

5. Configure the options and OK to create the gear

[HughesTooling]

There is a gear generator supplied with Fusion look under Scripts and Add-Ins.

Also take a look at the attached file, I don't think the gear generators will do what you want. You can open the file with New design from file on the file menu. You can adjust the teeth in the file but it does take a while to update.

Mark

[Anonymous]

Thanks for the help/input guys! I have gotten what I wanted! Thanks!