Can anyone do some laser gear cutting for me?

Feel free to talk about anything and everything in this board.
Post Reply
SamS
Old Timer
Posts: 2
Joined: Sun Aug 05, 2018 8:26 am

Can anyone do some laser gear cutting for me?

Post by SamS »

Hi, all!

I'm new here and have run through a lot of threads without finding anything about gear-cutting services.

Or laser cutting services in general, for that matter.

I have a project that needs some round and elliptical gears and a few swing arms for them to fit on.

All of the pieces would be cut from 1/16" sheet plastic so I can lay them out and test the fits and motions. Each piece would have a pinhole at its center of rotation so I could tack them to a board and see what works and what doesn't.

The gears would be between 3 and 6 inches in diameter, and the swing arms just slightly larger.

I'm working with a gear train that is so non-logical it almost defies description.

I can model in Rhino3D (a little), but the gears I'm working with at the moment may have been faked-to-fit. I definitely can't trust them.

They're all 1st order gears, though, so they'd be easy to regenerate with legal teeth.

I would need four identical elliptical gears, and three round gears of different sizes (two of each), plus one singleton round gear. And four swing arms, two long and two short.

It's really not a very complicated machine, just kind of non-Euclidian.

I've looked around locally and lucked out on having gears made with either laser cutting or water jet.

This is a "gig" kind of thing. I'd be quite happy to pay for time, labor & materials.

Mand
Old Timer
Posts: 17
Joined: Sun Jan 21, 2018 1:30 pm

Re: Can anyone do some laser gear cutting for me?

Post by Mand »

For laser cutting of gears, I've used Ponoko with some success, especially if I take time to nest everything to maximize my material efficiency (they have tips about this on their website).

One trick, however, is that the laser kerf is non-rectangular (smaller at the bottom than at the top -- \_/ basically). For your size this won't matter (1/16 is pretty thin) but I mention it in case you end up wanting thicker materials later on.... Lasers make it really easy to iterate.

Waterjet kerf is also non-rectangular, but I've got less experience with that myself.

I've got a laser (12x20" bed) so if Ponoko doesn't work out for you I might be able to help out, but I'd need the gears already designed as I've never messed with elliptical gearing so I'd have no idea what to do there. Also, some plastics are very not laser-friendly, so you'd probably need to be flexible on what plastic specifically gets used.

...but give Ponoko a whirl first, IMHO, as they're pretty good and user-friendly.
SamS
Old Timer
Posts: 2
Joined: Sun Aug 05, 2018 8:26 am

Re: Can anyone do some laser gear cutting for me?

Post by SamS »

Thanks, Mand.

I'll give them a try.

Good on ya', mate!
Post Reply

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 4 guests