Cut my first gear on CNC
 

Its a long project in mind, anyhow need some specific mod 1.5 size gears. Having my CNC at home, this is a first trial cutting a mod 1 gear ; its aluminum but just a start testing the procedure.

Results better than expected !

[YOUTUBE]nMps1Hmb81M[/YOUTUBE]

CNC is fun, isn't it!?

EXACTLY!

Just hooked on CNC and RC! And they go together well ;)

The RC got me into the CNC :lol:

Awesome work!

Exactly how I got started. :-)

RC got me into CNC machining too. 4th axle is cool. What did you used to program it? or did you create the gcode yourself?

I use mach3. Wrote my own code, it's quite simple, the tricky part getting the calculations right and zeroing in.

Used an excel table Sherline has on its website to calculate the depth of cutting.

Mach3 has a gear cutting wizard, Rene - its almost too easy once you have the setup figured out. The code is dead simple, too - rotate the A axis by the 360 degrees/tooth count(a 36t gear gets rotated 10 degrees for each cut) and cut to depth. Rinse, repeat. I actually do it on a 3 axis machine(position and lock the Z, then take the Z motor cable and connect it to the A axis motor).

I know MastercamX has the 4th axis interpreted as well, but you don't want to go into mastercam programming cutting a gear. Thanks for the hint on your Z sacrificing for the A axis! now you mention it, I can finetune the Z on my BF20 pretty easy too. And i have got a few NEMA23 motors.

Cool that you can cut your own gears, I know it can be done, just never thought about it actually doing it.

Mastercam is a fortune !

Yes, way too expensive. Have you seen Ertlcam? It has some neat features..

Me and apparently google haven't heard of ertlcam?

estlcam..

excuse me.

http://www.estlcam.com/

here is the trochoidal milling feature in action;

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WxZNachW0ME