Gears

Gears here, gears there, gears gears everywhere! Without gears, our whole assembly quite literally falls apart. When we first set out to use gears, we thought we could be able to purchase gears off of McMaster-Carr or Amazon. Little did we know, our options were not only limited but also the prices for gears were exorbitantly high. With all the gears we would have had to purchase, we would have spent well over $300 in gears alone! We knew Dr. Desphande would appreciate a different solution, so we set out to manufacture our own gears.

When it comes to designing gears, they have to be involute. If you design a gear that is perfectly involute, their teeth will always remain in mesh and the forces transmitted between teeth are exactly perpendicular to their motion of travel along the pitch diameter. This produces angular rotation that is relatively constant.

Additionally, interference can be an issue, if your gear ratio is too high for a given pinion diameter. Below are our calculations for interference.

Based on the above, our pinions must have at least 15 teeth to avoid interference. Since our pinion has 35 teeth, the pinion and gears will mesh without interference.

Below is an image of all of our gears aligned on one axis: