GearHeads Forum

Hi John:

  I see what you mean. Were these done with the "Maintain depth" option on do you know? ( Just curious.). I had thought
maintaining depth on the slit saw would help keep make the tip of the blade have less of a stepping effect on the result,
but had never confirmed it.

  I think its quite possible what you suggest would clean up the cut marks, depending on saw diameter and thickness of
the blank. Im willing to look into adding that , doesnt sound all that difificult in the end. It will be the fall before I get to it,
but consider it onthe fix-up list rather than a feature request.

  Thx for  the photos, they really help to show an issue.

Art

Cutting clock gears with thin slitting saws is very promising but the segmentation is hard to optimize. Too high a segmentation impacts cutting time badly. Here is a closeup with segmentation of 8

[img]http://www.castlewoodconsultants.com/Misc/RoughingPasses.jpg[/img]

showing ridges that will impact friction of a gearpair.

How about adding another machining process for each tooth flank that has the cutter positioned, in X, on the middle of the edge of the wheel and does a Y move into the root generating the tooth face by coordinated motion of Z and A with the Y infeed?

If a low feed rate can be called up for this then a very smooth tooth can be made with little impact on the total cutting time.

This would produce a dished face in the dedendum but for thin gears and a reasonable saw diameter this would not be objectionable. If one wanted to avoid the dish for cosmetic reasons say when cutting a small stack of gears, then the Y-depth could just kiss the root in the middle as the tooth flanks are probably flat in this area.

John Prentice