GearHeads Corner

Hi Art,

I am probably doing something dumb but I would appreciate some help. I am trying to cut a 0.6M epicycloidal gear 72 tooth - no spokes.

When I select the gear and then go to output manager, tick 4th axis, y parallel and go I get the param file and text file but no tap file.

Any suggestions?

Thanks
Chris

Hi Chris:

  The problem is that 4th axis cannot do epicycloidals. The 4th axis was written for involutes, so primarily it was designed
to do tangental shaving algorithms. ( The fly cutter output was later added for when a person has need to simply do a back
and forth pattern ). Since epicycloidals dont follow an involute path the tangentals dont work for them so they are illegal to
use as outputs for epi's.

    If your using a epi shaped cutter you could fake the sytem by selecting an invloute gear with similar depths with fly cutter selected, but for the most part epi's cannot be done by 4th axis.

I will be correcting this in GT so that almost any gear can be done in 4th axis. At the moment however, EPI's are primarily only cuttable from 2.5D

Art