Glenfern Associates: Making Gears
Introduction
For any company that makes bespoke gears, time is spent routinely making the engineering calculations that are necessary before any machining can take place.
Calculations for machining gears vary in complexity and difficulty, and where a factory or workshop handles a wide spectrum of jobs that vary from day to day, such calculations consume valuable time by tying up key personnel in small to medium sized operations.
The calculations are often tedious and prone to error, and lack a consistent approach, which is hardly conducive to good quality assurance.
Previously
More than a decade ago, one of our associates wrote an MS-DOS application that performed engineering calculations to assist mainly small workshops.
The application was entered into a competition sponsored by the CBI, the DTI and the BCS, namely the "1992 Manufacturing Intelligence Award".
Renaissance
We have decided to rewrite the application, and make it available at low cost to registered users by subscription as a number of services using a web browser.
They will be introduced in stages, beginning early in 2009.
Services
They cater for gears with standard and modified tooth forms, cut to British and American standards in ferrous, non-ferrous, plastic and composite materials.
- Racks
- Straight spur gears
- Single and double helical gears
- Worms and wheels
- Straight-toothed bevel gears
- Sizing of spur gears to ANSI standards.
How They Work
Each service behaves like an intelligent calculator, relying upon theory and the captured knowledge and experience of an expert, acting invisibly behind the scenes, and aims to find a solution within one minute.
Features
- A simple question and answer dialogue is used, asking only relevant questions. Many do not require numerical input.
- Context sensitive help is available to support each question. The user can browse, reading as much, or as little, as required. Help is tailored to suit novice and expert alike.
- A service always tries to find a solution to the current problem, issuing warnings when compliance with a standard is in doubt.
- Geometrical data and machining parameters are provided on screen with metric and imperial units supported.
- Engineering drawings will be available later.
Pilot
We have introduced a free service to enable us to gauge the likely interest in this range of products in the long term. The pilot is concerned with finding pairs of gears that produce a given ratio, subject to a given tolerance of ±0.5%, say.
Please let us know if you would find the services we have described useful. We welcome feedback and constructive criticism.
You can access our free service here.