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Hash, Inc. - Animation:Master

Gear shape experiment


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  • Hash Fellow

This is the profile of common "spur gear".

10teeth.jpg

The edge where a gear tooth will contact the tooth of a neighboring gear has a special curve called an "involute," designed to allow the gear teeth to smoothly slide over each other as their gears turn on their axes.

This curve varies depending on how many teeth a gear has (and other factors) but the tooth overall tends to have six landmark points that are easily distinguished, which I have marked in red...

image.png

 

A spline made with six points per tooth can approximate this shape. Here I have fit six points to one tooth and used the Duplicator wizard to copy that around the remainder of the gear...

image.png

 

The resulting A:M spline shape closely matches the intended contact interaction..

gear003.gif

 

Possibly a wizard could be made to create proper gear outlines (for any size gear and any number of teeth) in A:M for 3D printing projects. I realize dedicated CAD programs usually have some tool for gear design but it would be fun to be able to create working mechanisms with native A:M models.

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