Hard Gear Finishing (HGF), a relatively new technology, represents an advance in gear process engineering. The use of Computer Numerical Controlled (CNC) equipment ensures a high precision synchronous relationship between the tool spindle and the work spindle as well as other motions, thereby eliminating the need for gear trains. A hard gear finishing machine eliminates problems encountered in two conventional methods - gear shaving, which cannot completely correct gear errors in gear teeth, and gear rolling, which lacks the ability to remove stock and also drives the workpiece without a geared relationship to the master rolling gear. Such a machine provides greater accuracy, reducing the need for conventional gear crowning, which results in gears of greater face width than necessary.
The art of gear hobbing has advanced dramatically since the development and introduction of unique machine and tool features such as no backlash, super rigidity, automatic loading of cutting tools, CNC controls, additional machine power and improved cutter materials and coatings. It is essential to utilize all these features to run the machine economically.
In conventional gear grinders, grinding wheels with Alundum grains and a hardness of about 2000 HV have been used for finishing steel gears with hardnesses up to about 1000HV. In this case, the accuracy of the gears ground is greatly affected by wear of the grinding wheel because the difference in hardness is comparatively small when the gears are fully hardened.
Until recently, form gear grinding was conducted almost exclusively with dressable, conventional abrasive grinding wheels. In recent years, preformed, plated Cubic Boron Nitride (CBN) wheels have been introduced to this operation and a considerable amount of literature has been published that claim that conventional grinding
wheels will be completely replaced in the future. The superior machining properties of the CBN wheel are not disputed in this paper.
Sub: 'Finding Tooth Ratios' article published in Nov/Dec 1985 issue
Let us congratulate you and Orthwein, W.C. for publishing this superb article in Gear Technology Journal. We liked the article very much and wish to impliment it in our regular practice.
One of the current research
activities here at California State University at Fullerton is systematization of existing knowledge of design of planetary gear trains.
Your May/June issue contains a
letter from Edward Ubert of Rockwell
International with some serious questions
about specifying and measuring tooth thickness.
The fundamental purpose of gear
grinding is to consistently and economically produce "hard" or "soft" gear tooth elements within the accuracy required by the gear functions. These gear elements include tooth profile, tooth spacing, lead or parallelism, axial profile, pitch line runout, surface finish, root fillet profile,
and other gear geometry which contribute
to the performance of a gear train.