Gear template generator

Tooth spacing Contact angle(deg): Shaft hole dia.

Show pitch
(mm): (mm):
diameter
Gear 2 teeth:
Show line of
Gear 1 teeth: Show rotated (%
Two gears contact
of a tooth):
Spokes: Show center
Printed page width
(mm): Show spokes Show cm grid
Animate
Dividing plate
mode
Explain fields
 (Help)

Download HPGL
Some notes about gear design and this gear template generator
This template generator is intended for generating paper templates for cutting
low precision gears from plywood, phenolic, or other suitable materials with a
band saw.
This gear template generator generates shapes for involute spur gears. Involute
spur gears have involute shaped teeth. The best way to explain how the involute
is formed is to select two gears, and check the "show line of contact" checkbox.
The red line will show the line of tooth contact for the given gears, as well as the
base circles. The gears work as though a string was unwound from the right
gear's base circle, and wound onto the other base circle. A point on the string
essentially traces the involute of the teeth. Note that the teeth always make
contact along the red line, and exactly perpendicular to the line. The angle of this
line with respect to vertical is the pressure angle ('Tooth angle' field in the form
above)
 You can now buy a downloadble
gear template generator.
More features, runs on your PC

The gear tooth generation is not perfect. Normally, one rounds the tips of gear
teeth a little bit, which this program doesn't do. Also, for gears with less than
about 10 teeth, and low tooth angles, its necessary to make the teeth quite
narrow at the bottom (undercut), or to alter the geometry (profile shifts). So
some combinations with gears of small numbers of teeth may overlap, or jam if
they were real. You can check to see if the gears would overlap by selecting the
'animate' and 'two gears' checkboxes for your gears and watching them turn. My
non-free gear program will automatically calculate the necessary undercut to
make the gears mesh.

Ring gear / planetary motion gears

You can also generate templates for inside gearing, such as would be used for
planetary motion gears. Simply enter a negative number of teeth for one of the
gears, and that gear will be an inside gear. Select a large number for the shaft
diameter when making a template to get a circle around the gear. For more
about how to work out the number of teeth and ratio, see this note on planetary
gear ratios and calculations

Rack and pinion gearing

You can also generate rack and pinion gears. Just enter zero for the number of
teeth of a gear, and the program will draw a straight gear rack instead of a gear
for that gear.

There are some excellent notes on gear undercut and other design issues for
small gears here on the web.

The involute shape of gears is very important for gears that run at high speed.
However, for wooden gears, it really doesn't matter very much. Even if you don't
cut the gears with an involute shape, the template generator is still useful as a
form of protractor using the "dividing plate mode" for dividing the circle into even
intervals. For an example of a different method of cutting gears, see my Wooden
gear cutting jig

Printing the gear templates

To print the gear template, use the 'Print' button, rather than just printing the web
page from the browser. The print button tells flash to print just the flash contents.
It gets dumped to the printer in vector form, so screen resolution is not a limiting
factor. A rather cool feature of flash, I think! To get the sizes specified to be
correct, its best to print a test template, and then measure the distance between
the lines at the top of the image, and enter that under "page width". Subsequent
printouts should be scaled so that the millimeters are exact. For gears larger
than a sheet of paper, the gear is offset from center. That way, multiple copies
can be printed and pasted together to form a gear template up to 40 cm in
diameter.

My downloadable gear generator program that I have for sale doesn't need the
scale calibration, and can paginate across many pages for larger gears.

I recommend ink jet printers over laser printers for printing gear templates. The
fine colour registration requirements of ink jet print heads forces the printer
makers to make sure that the image is not stretched or compressed in either
direction. With laser printers, a stretch does not cause registration problems, so
some laser printer output is sometimes stretched by as much as a percent in
one axis. Its best to check that the diameter is consistent along the vertical,
horizontal, and diagonal to be sure there is no distortion.

Example plywood gears from a template

I also used my gear template generator for the gears of my screw advance box
joint jig

Also check out my Wood gear cutting jig. I have to admit though that I have not
used this jig since writing this gear template generator.

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