General Purpose 3D-Printable Gears

Here we have a set of Solidworks files that can produce a variety of gears, including spur, herringbone, helical, worm, and rack gears.

Parts can be modified fairly simply by changing values in the Equations page as shown here:

Most of the parameters are calculated automatically by default, but most can be modified to suit your preferences.

A few things to note:

  • Adjacent gears need to have the same pressure angle, pitch, and tooth height. Adjacent herringbone gears also must have the same thickness and skew. If you don't change these values, then you don't need to worry about them.
  • Worm gears are designed to mate with helical gears. If you change the size of the worm gear, then you'll need to adjust the skew of the helical gear to match.
  • For large gears, the last two features on the feature manager cut spokes into the gears to minimize mass and printing time/material. For small gears, simply suppress these two features to make the gear solid.