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Helical Gears
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Herringbone Gears
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Add-in Dialog
Inspiration
I'm working on a project that needs some 3D printed gears. I needed a way to create gears with backlash so I began by modifying the SpurGear script that ships with Fusion360 and allong the way I learned about helical gears and thought they'd be a better fit for my project than simple spur gears.
What it does
From Wikipedia: Helical or "dry fixed" gears offer a refinement over spur gears. The leading edges of the teeth are not parallel to the axis of rotation, but are set at an angle. Since the gear is curved, this angling makes the tooth shape a segment of a helix. Helical gears can be meshed in parallel or crossed orientations.
This add-in can also be used to create screw gear down to a single tooth.
Supports specifying gears in either the 'Normal' or the 'Radial' system.
How I built it
Python of course. And this technical reference from qtcgears.com about various types of gears was truly invaluable.
Challenges I ran into
Generating a Helix required more attention than I expected. Come to find out projecting a line onto a cylinder in Fusion360 is not how one makes a helix.
Accomplishments that I'm proud of
It works!
What I learned
Gears are more than triangles - doubly true for helical gears.
What's next for Helical Gear Generator
I'd like to persist user inputs between launches of the add-in, add double helix gear generation (it's easy enough to do by simply mirroring a single helix gear but still worth adding), maybe add tooth fillet/chamfer options, maybe add some features to make 3D printing of gears easier (e.g. something to combat elephant footing).
Some other things I'm considering is support for offset compensated gears (e.g. generate 2 gears together with a target center distance) and generating gears at arbitrary angles to each other.
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