One of the modelers I follow makes a bunch of gaming stuff, that is also useful for us. He just released a big set of gears for this week’s free stuff. You need to sign up for his mailing list, but he gives away something every Monday.
Test printed a couple of them at 200%. They have promise, but they’re pretty thin, I think the Z scaling needs to be 400-500% to make them look reasonable.
Bob,
if you want working gears, i will often download models from stock drive products and print them. i also have an excel spreadsheet that i use to generate the tooth profile.
Al P.
Also Mcmaster-Carr, their models are nice.
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Hi guys,
There’s a programmable approach to making 3D gears that can generate an stl file for many different types of gears.
The software needed is openscad, a free, open source design tool for 3D printing, plus an add-on library for making a wide variety of shapes, including gears.
Here’s a gear I made to replace a broken drive gear for our model ski lift gondola.
And here are the two lines of code I wrote to make the gear:
use <MCAD/utilities.scad>
spur_gear (modul=0.75, tooth_number=50, width=6, bore=6, pressure_angle=15, helix_angle=-5, optimized=false, shaftLength=12, shaftDiameter = 10, baseThickness = 4);
Sources:
openscad: https://openscad.org/
add-on library: https://github.com/openscad/MCAD/blob/master/utilities.scad
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I sure do like OpenSCAD. It seems a lot easier than some of the other drawing assist tools.
VERY easy to share the “HOW TO” as well…
I’m not even close to being an expert on it. Right now, I’m trying to figure out HOW to get the default view back on my Mac. (Somehow, I re-arranged the windows, and it’s difficult to model anything.)
That’s an issue I’ve had as well. In my case, I closed the code window by mistake. That can be restore by choosing Window->Hide Editor. But that’s in WIndows. Your Mac mileage may vary.