Finding a way to make efficient gears for the spring design was tough. The team explored various options for creating gear models, but it was apparent that involute gears were the most efficient for tooth meshing. The team could attempt to create an involute gear model using the circular pattern tool in SolidWorks; however, attempting this resulted in gears that were not perfect and were generally inefficient. Since this course does not cover anything to do with gears, rather than attempting to learn how to design involute gears from scratch, the team used the free online gear designer provided by RushGears. RushGears takes in basic specifications for creating a gear (number of teeth, pitch, pressure angle, etc.) and creates a SolidWorks model of the gear that could then be transferred into a SolidWorks drawing which could then be laser cut. RushGears does not recommend using their 3D model tool for the creation of physical gears, because the models don’t provide perfectly efficient gears; however, the team was confident that the resulting gears would work well enough, and that the small loss of efficiency would be of little effect.
An Example of a Gear from RushGears:
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