ExhibiTricks: "Did you ever have the need/desire to cut some gear shapes out of basic materials like wood or phenolic using basic tools like a band saw?
If so, you owe it to yourself to check out the Web-based Gear Template Generator created by Matthias Wandel."
4 comments:
This is amazingly cool, and I'm so glad it was posted. Given I'm into steampunk, which has a really big gear fixation this site is kind of a blessing. The key to gears is regularity, as you want your parts to actually fit together, but regularity is not something most people are good at doing free hand, or even with really basic tools. This site is proof that someone somewhere can write code to simplify just about whatever you are doing, another reason the dram school should respect our fellow cmu students over in computer sciences.
I played around with the gear generation program the article was talking about, and found a somewhat major flaw in it. While the program will really help in the creation of really quite nice looking gears, it does nothing to indicate how these gears will interact with each other. Yes the program will show you how Gear 1 and Gear 2 will interlock, and how they will spin, but that's it. There is no concept for gear ratios, and the gears seem to spin at the same rate no matter what size. The program will also generate gears that can not physically work. The program seems great for usage in almost purely visual usage, but I fear how frustrated someone who actually tried to use this program might become if they tried to use the gears for anything real or functional.
Wandel's web site has been a favorite of mine for some time now, and it's not the first time we've seen reference to it here. In addition to the gears (which apparently gave the site its name) it also contains a lot of information on joinery, general shop practice, and how to get the most out of low-budget and used tools when that's all that you can afford or have room for. Sometimes him being outside of the united states shows through in metric dimensions and odd brands turning up now and then, but with a few conversions it's not too difficult to adapt.
This website really is pretty useful for someone that doesn't have the access to the programs that we've had and for further knowledge afterwards. It's great to have this kind of resource for tips about using tools perhaps in ways we're not intending and for unconventional sources of information, as Tom has pointed out.
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