OUTSIDE: Making gears at home

Making gears at home is quite difficult and a lot of tools and machinery are needed.

At least you need a rotary attachment for a mill or lathe with a specialized tool (involute gear cutter).
Another drawback is that to cut a specific gear you need a specific size of involute gear cutter, so a complete set (normally 8 pieces, around 100 bucks) is needed.

Chet out this great video by Tubalcain:

Another option is to build a small spur gear hobber machine (project already in the wishlist) like this beautiful one by Jack Hayes:

Also in this case, only the hobber, quite difficult to find, at least requires 80 bucks.

Solution? Not for helical or spur gears, but there is a particular set of gears, called worm gears you can machine at home. 

From wikipedia: "Worm-and-gear sets are a simple and compact way to achieve a high torque, low speed gear ratio. For example, helical gears are normally limited to gear ratios of less than 10:1 while worm-and-gear sets vary from 10:1 to 500:1"
Is possible to find this set of gears in telescope aligning mechanism or in a mill 4th rotary axis. In this set the two axis are perpendicular, and only one is driving.
The drived gear can be machined easily using only a lathe, and the other one may be simply a machine screw with imperial, metric, acme or custom thread. Is only needed to have the a screw tapper.

Check out this self-explanatory video by Dalibor Farny:

Finally a link of great kinematics models. From KMODDL site: "KMODDL is a collection of mechanical models and related resources for teaching the principles of kinematics--the geometry of pure motion. The core of KMODDL is the Reuleaux Collection of Mechanisms and Machines, an important collection of 19th-century machine elements held by Cornell's Sibley School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering."
http://kmoddl.library.cornell.edu/stillImages/Chicago/small/011.jpg
Digital file property of Cornell University Library. Made available under the same terms as a Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial Share Alike License

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