原文： Gear manufacturing methods There are two basic methods of manufacturing gear teeth: the generating process and the forming process. when a gear tooth is generated, the workpiece and the cutting or grinding tool are in continuous mesh and the tooth form is generated by the tool. In other words, the work and the tool are conjugated to each other. hobbing :machines, shaper cutters, shaving machines, and grinders use this principle. When a gear tooth is formed, the tool is in the shape of the space that is being machined out. Some grinding machines use this principle with an indexing mechianism which allows the gear teeth to be formed tooth by tooth. Broaches are examples of form tools that machine all the gear teeth simultaneously. shaping Shaping is inherently similar to planning but uses a circular cuttrer instead of rack and the resulting reduction in the reciprocating inertia allows much higher stroking speeds: modern shapers cutting car gears can run at 2,000 cutting strokes per minmute. The shape of the cutter is roughly the same as an involute gear but the tips of the teeth are rounded. The generating drive between cutter and workpiece does not involve a rack or leadscrew since only circular motion in involved. The tool and workpiece move tangential typically 0.5 mm for each stroke of the cutter. On the return stroke the cutter must be retracted about 1 mm to give clearance otherwise tool rub occurs on the backstroke and failure is rapid. The speed on this type of machine is limited by the rate at which some 50kg of cutter and bearings can be moved a distance of 1 mm. the accelerations involved tequire forces of the order of 5000N yet high accuracy must be maintained. The advantages of shaping are that production rates are relatively high and that it is possible to cut right up to a shoulder. Unfortunately, for helical gears, a helical guide is required to impose a rotational motion on the stroking motion; such helical guides cannot be produced easily or cheaply so the method is only suitable for long runs with helical gears since special cutters and guides must be manufactured for each different helix angle. A great advantage of shaping is its ability to annular gears such as those required for large epicyclie drives. When very high accuracy is of importance the inaccuracies in the shaping cutter matter since they may transfer to the cut gear. It is obvious that profile errors will transfer but it is less obvious than an eccentrically mounted or ground cutter will give a characteristic “dropped tooth”. There are several causes for “dropped tooth” but it occurs most commonly when the diameter of the workpiece is about half, one and half,
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two and a half, etc, times the cutter diameter. If the cutter starts on a high point and finishes on a low point during the final finishing revolution of the gear the peak to peak eccentricity errors in the cutter occurs between the last and the first tooth of the final revolution of the cut gear; as the cumulative pitch error of the cutter may well be over 25 microns there is a sudden pitch error of this amount on the cut gear. The next gear cut on the machine may however be very good on adjacent pitch if the final cut happened to start in a favorable position on the cutter. Various attempts have been made to prevent this effect, in particular by continuing rotation without any further cutter infeed but if the shaping machine is not very rigid and the cutter very sharp then no further cutting will occur and the error will not be removed. hobbing hobbing, the most used metal cutting method, uses the rack generating principle but avoids slow reciprocation by mounting many “racks ” on a rotating cutter. The “racks” are displaced axially to form a gashed worm. The “racks” do not generate the correct involute shape for the whole length of the teeth since they are moving on a circular path and so the hob is fed slowly along the teeth either axially in normal or in the direction of the helix in “oblique” hobbing. Metal removal rates are high since no reciprocation of hob or workpiece is required and so cutting speeds of 40 m/min can be used for conventional hobs and up to 150m/min for carbide hobs. Typically with a 100mm diameter hob the rotation speed will be 100rpm and so a twenty tooth workpiece will rotate at 5 rpm. Each revolution of the workpiece will correspond to 0.75mm feed so the hob will advance through the workpiece at about 4mm per minute. For car production roughing multiple start hobs can be used with coarse feeds of 3mm per revolution so that 100 rpm on the cutter, a two-start hob and a 20 tooth gear will give a feed rate of 30mm/minute. The disadvantage of a coarse feed rate is that a clear marking is left on the workpiece, particularly in the root, showing a pattern at a spacing of the feed rate per revolution. This surface undulation is less marked on the flanks than in the root and is not important when there is a subsequent finishing operation such as shaving or grinding. When there are no further operations the feed per revolution must be restricted to keep the undulations below a limit which is usually dictated by lubrication conditions. The height of the undulations in the root of the gear is given by squaring the feed per revolution and dividing by four times the diameter of the hob; 1 mm feed and 100mm diameter gives 2.5 micron high undulations in the root. On the gear flank the undulation is roughly cos70 as large, i.e., about 0.85 micron. Accuracy of hobbing is normally high for pitch and for helix, provided machines are
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maintained; involute is dependent solely on the accuracy of the hob profile. As the involute form is generated by as many cuts as there are gashes on the hob the involute is not exact, but if there are, say, 14 tangents generating a flank of 20 mm radius curvature about 4 mm high the divergence from a true involute is only about half a micron; hob manufacturing and mounting errors can be above 10 microns. Use of twostart hobs or oblique hobbing gives increased error levels since hob errors of pitching transfer to the cut gear. broaching Broaching is not used for helical gears but is useful for internal spur gears; the principal use of broaching in this context is for internal splines which cannot easily be made by any other method. As with all broaching the method is only economic for large quantities since setup costs are high. The major application of broaching techniques to helical external gears is that used by Gleasons in their G-TRAC machine .this machine operates by increasing the effective radius of a hobbing cutter to infinity so that each tooth of the cutter is traveling in a straight line instead of on a radius. This allows the cutting action to extend over the whole facewidth of a gear instead of the typical 0.75 mm feed per revolution of hobbing. The resulting process gives a very high production rate , more suitable for U.S.A. production volumes than for the relatively low European volumes and so, despite a high initial cost ,is very competitive. Broaching give high accuracy and good surface finish but like all cutting processes is limited to “soft” materials which must be subsequently casehardened or heat treated, giving distortion. Shaving A shaving cutting cutter looks like a gear which has extra clearance at the root and whose tooth flanks have been grooved to give cutting edges. It is run in mesh with the rough gear with crossed axes so that there is in theory point contact with a relative velocity along the teeth giving scraping action. The shaving cutter teeth are relatively flexible in bending and so will only operate effectively when they are in double contact between two gear teeth. The gear and cutter operate at high rotational speeds with traversing of the workface and about 100 mm micron of material is removed. Cycle times can be less than half a minute and the machines are not expensive but cutters are delicate and difficult to manufacture. It is easy to make adjustments of profile at the shaving stage and crowning can be applied. Shaving can be carried out near a shoulder by using a cutter which is plunged in to depth without axial movement; this method is fast but requires more complex cutter design.
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grinding Grinding is extremely important because it is the main way hardened gear are machined. When high accuracy is required it is not sufficient to pre-correct for heat treatment distortion and grinding is then necessary. The simplest approach to grinding, often termed the Orcutt method. The wheel profile is dressed accurately to shape using single point diamonds which are controlled by templates cut to the exact shape required; 6:1 scaling with a pantograph is often used. The profile wheel is then reciprocated axially along the gear which rotates to allow for helix angle effects; when one tooth shape has been finished, involving typically 100 micron metal removal the gear is indexed to the next tooth space. This method is fairly show but gives high accuracy consistently. Setting up is lengthy because different dressing templates are needed if module, number of teeth, helix angle, or profile correction are changed. The fastest grinding method uses the same principle as hobbing but replaces a gashed and relieved worm by a grinding wheel which is a rack in section. Since high surface speeds are needed the wheel diameter is increased so that wheels of 0.5 m diameter can run at over 2000 rpm to give the necessary 1000 m/min. only single start worms are cut on the wheel but gear rotation speeds are high,100 rpm typically, so it is difficult to design the drive system to give accuracy and rigidity. Accuracy of the process is reasonably high although there is a tendency for wheel and workpiece to deflect variably during grinding so the wheel form may require compensation for machine deflection effects. Generation of a worm shape on the grinding wheel is a slow process since a dressing diamond or roller must not only form the rack profile but has to move axially as the wheel rotates. Once the wheel has been trued, gears can be ground rapidly until redressing is required. This is the most popular method for high production rates with small gear and is usually called the Reishauer method. Large gears are usually generated by the Maag method which is similar to planning in its approach but uses cup grinding wheels of large diameter to form the flanks of the theoretical mating rack. Gears of very large diameter cannot easily be moved so the gear is essentially stationary while the grinding wheel carriage reciprocates in the direction of the helix. The wheel is only in contact over a small part of the facewidth in helical gears so this is not important when only a few gears of this size are made in a year. As with form grinding, after grinding a pair of flanks the gear is indexed to the next pair. A similar method used for medium size gears has stationary wheels, while the rough gear is traversed under the wheels. Corresponding rotational movement of the gear is controlled by steel bands unwrapping from a cylinder of pitch circle diameter so that the
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