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The Essential Tools and Technologies Involved in Gear Shaping
Gear shaping is a method of creating splines or teeth on gears. It is a multi-step process that can produce accurate and precise splines on different gear designs. The teeth are cut close to the shoulder of the gear, allowing for deeper grooves.
Gear shaping can be used to generate various types of gears including spur and helical gears. The resulting gear has very low margins of error since it is an automated and highly accurate process.
Cutting the tooth involves the cutter moving across the gear blank to produce the splines. The specialized equipment used to do this has cutting edges that provide grooves to clear away the material being cut during the process. This tool can have attachments with special features for designs or specifications to be cut into the splines.
Another important aspect of gear shaping is the type of drill bit used to achieve a specification. Choosing the right material and type depends on the properties of the material to be drilled during the gear shaping process. There are various types of drill bits you may want to consider depending on your application:
- Twist drill bits are mass produced for the consumer market and can be used on plastics, wood, metals and others. Most have a point angle of 118 degrees for drilling any material while the shallower angle of 150 degrees work best for drilling metal and gear shaping.
- Spade drill bits are an alternative to overcoming shaping issues at high speed since they run at faster speed and feed rate to generate large diameter bores and special contours. Spade drills can be customized based on the gear shaping specifications.
- Indexable drill bits are highly preferred when high precision is required, but they are comparably expensive. They are mostly used in CNC machining to cut holes with speed and can outperform other types of drills in material removal and most industrial applications.
Most gears have to be shaped depending on unique customer requirements. True Gear and Spline specializes in CNC gear shaping and cutting using the most sophisticated technology. With our CNC controlled helix angle capabilities and quick return stroke, large production orders are easily accommodated.
Consistency and accuracy are our fundamental principles in working with any production size, big or small. All of our gears undergo thorough inspection process to ensure your requirements are satisfied.