Gear Generator Fusion
Charise Scrivner
Helical gears resemble spur gears with the teeth at an angle. They can be meshed in parallel or crossed orientations at 90 degrees or arbitrary angles and can be generated with as little as a single tooth forming a screw gear.
Gears may be specified in either the 'Normal' or the 'Radial' system or the fixed profile Sunderland standard, any of which can be generated as either Left or Right handed. Handedness in helical gears refers to the direction the teeth lean when the gear is placed flat on a table.
Using this add-in, proper Herringbone gears (such as the gears used for this add-in's thumbnail) can be created by using a Sunderland profile then mirroring the gear about one of its faces. In the case of Herringbone or other double-helix gears, the handedness of the base gear is not as significant as it is for single helix gears - to effectively change the handedness of a Herringbone / double helix gear all you need to do is flip it over - whereas for a single helix gear it must be mirrored to change its handedness.
Finally, by setting a helix angle of 0 degrees, Spur gears can be created and defined in the metric system (as opposed to the sample Spur Gear script which defines gears in the American system) with this add-in.
ATTENTION MAC USERS: If you experience issues with the installer please see this article first. Then if you still have trouble installing the plugin e-mail me (ross....@gmail.com) and I will provide a workaround.
Very simple to use with great little guidance points aloing the way. In less than an hour I had experimented with over a dozen different gear sets to find the best combination for my design idea. Preview and gear data allowed me to adjust the diameter to meet my particular application.....amazing! I can't imagine how many days it saved me.
Dude! I have been stuck for years trying to create a set of crossed helical gears for a 1920's gas engine model, and now I can! This set is in inches but I was able to noodle out the metric equivalents.
Looking forward to experimenting with the backlash setting... I want to print a working set for a model, and my resin prints are usually a little "fat" on the surface. Is the lash mm setting an equivalent normal offset of the surface?
Screw gears are simply a low tooth count helical gear with a very high helix angle. The one pictured has 4 teeth but you can go as low as 1 tooth. Such a gear is easiest to define in the "normal" system as the diameter of the gear is then a free variable - in other words expect a low tooth count gear to have a large diameter.The real trick is to realize that this is a crossed-helix application - notice that the direction of rotation of input to output is shifted by 90 degrees. In a standard mesh you would create 2 gears with the same helix angle and of opposite hands. In a crossed mesh like this you create 2 gears of the SAME hand whose helix angles add up to the desired mesh angle (90 in this case). For example to create a 40:1 ratio with a 1 tooth screw and 40T spur you could use a helix angle of 80 degrees on the screw (1T) and a helix angle of 10 degrees on the spur (40T) both of EITHER left OR right handedness. Yes, you can create gears that mesh at other angles - it doesn't have to be 0 or 90 it can be anything but at some point it will make sense to flip the handedness of one of the pair - for example one could think of a left handed gear as simply a right handed one with a greater than 90 degree helix angle.Note that what you'll end up with is a screw gear mesh NOT a worm and worm gear. Screw and worm gear meshes serve the same general purpose but worms can be used for considerably higher load applications than screws. A true worm mesh has a line of contact between the meshing faces which allows it to transfer considerably higher loads than the point contact of the screw mesh where the teeth are literally contacting at only a single point. Be sure to use a lubricant (white lithium grease, etc., assuming plastic) after a break in period to prolong the gears lifetime.
See the hover text / image on the Gear Standard field. Use the radial system (not normal system) for the behavior you are looking for (where module and tooth number result in a fixed gear diameter independent of helical angle). In the normal system changing the helical angle will change the gear diameter.
Correction - screw gears, not worm gears. Cross helical mesh (aka screw gears) as can be made with this plugin have a point contact while worm gears have a line of contact and can carry significantly more load.I've dabbled with generating bevel gears but they are surprisingly not very standardized with multiple common tooth profiles in use for various reasons, mostly to do with manufacturing methods. My exploration into spherical involute profiles (which I did many years ago now) never got beyond the proof of concept stage, but I did manage to generate a few bevel gear profiles but IIRC fusion started to really chug on more than moderate tooth counts (I'm sure it would do better these days - they have made a lot of performance improvements over the years).As for spiral gears... the math gets nuts and it's frankly beyond me to work out for myself and I never found a source for generating the gear profiles programmatically - nor had the need myself to really force me to figure it out :P
This is a minimalistic gear design application. As such, its designs are made following the metric module DIN standard series. Regardless, it is made for everyone, no matter your amount of knowledge or if you have an engineering background. It includes 11 different types of gears (7 standards, 2 non-standard and 2 experimental) for every project you might want to implement them in:
The two types considered non-standard were included for 3D printing since these designs of internal gears have proven to be practical when tight tolerances are a liability. Nonetheless, these designs are as useful as others.
Hi, this IS NOT an error inherent to Mac OS (Ican tell since I have a Mac M2 myself and I've made tests with it, as well asthe autodesk team on a Mac M3). What seems to be going on is that you have Capture Design History mode disabled, thus not allowing the app to work properly as it uses the timeline to hide bodies when creating new gears (to avoid interference and unwanted modifications to other bodies). Please enable the Capture Design History mode and update us.If you're still having issues, I'd be glad to personally walk you through them, just send an email over to gfsolucione...@gmail.com .
I find this plugin very helpful and especially appreciate that it is free! One small issue I have noticed is that when I close Fusion 360 I always get an error message staying "plugin stopped" which prevents the program from closing until I have clicked "ok" on the message -- this can consumer memory and battery if you aren't looking out for it.
My suggestion is that in a multi-part assembly, it might be helpful to have the center geometry of the gear be more easily selectable for use with the move tool.
Overall though this is a great app and I appreciate the creators giving it to the community free of charge!
This is a great plugin. Im making a lot of projects with gears. It would be just perfect if it had an option to generate globoidal worm gears, right now im generating a set of gears in blender and then using the mesh in fusion but its uncovinient and time consuming. Im creating the gears like shown in this tutorial Im sure the creator of this plugin could in some way translate the comands the otwinta site generates, or use them to create a new function in the plugin.
Summary: If you want a quick and easy way to generate 3D models of a wide variety of gears in Fusion360, this tool is great. If you plan to manufacture (e.g. 3D print, CNC, etc.) the gears for a physical object in real life, you should pick a different plugin (more on that below).
Thank you to the GF Gear Generator team for providing this plugin! It's very gIt seems to work nicely for generating 3D models for a variety of gears, but for designing functional prototypes there are some improvements I would like to request.
+I wish the software would remember my last select parameters. If I'm making many spur gears that are a 1.0 module gear with 15 teeth, for example, each time I open the spur gear option, it resets to selecting "0.3 module" "17 teeth" by default. That makes it cumbersome, especially when quickly testing multiplel gears with small changes to test what works best.
+When creating a worm gear, I like how a complementary spur gear is created to work with it. However, when they are generated, they are not automatically oriented such that they are meshed together. This means I have to take time to calculate and measure how and where to align them.
+Backlash and Clearance features are essential if trying to 3D p rint/manufacture the gears, so it would be great to have those. Actually without the Backlash feature, it's difficult to use this plugin in a practical setting.
+When creating a gear, all the sketches and bodies associated with the gear get dumped into the top level component of the fusion360 file. This gets messy because it clutters up the main component with dozens of sketches. It would be great if the plugin either automatically created a new component, or dumped all the sketches into whichever component I have selected. (I think the former option might be preferable because it makes the process a bit faster for users creating multiple gears).
+It would be great when selecting gear parameters, for the window to also show a preview of some of the other dimensions of the gear that will result. For example, in the Gear sample plugin that comes with Fusion360, when you select a Module of 0.5 and 20 teeth, it will tell you that the Pitch Diameter is going to be 10mm. It shows other resulting parameters as well, allowing one to quickly tweak the user-entered parameters and see what will happen, without needing to generate and then inspect the gear afterwards.
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