aug 1 1442 traveling west

thinking about making the gear meshing functional, i observed the animations a little and it seems to me that the point where the involute curve stops, distant from the gear, needs to be moving at most tangent to the other tooth’s curve, when it does so. if it’s moving instead toward the surface of the other tooth, then it will begin pressuring the tooth at a different angle than designed.

this might give a function for the final radius of the involute curve, which then could be converted to parameters …

1609

it makes more sense if i realize that the pitch point does not need to be the middle of the involute curve … but then i’m not sure if that works …

1640 i guess there’s a point where the endpoints of the curve touch, and the radiuses of the curve need to be such that the bases of triangles with the angles to that point sum to the sum of the pitch radiuses of the to gears 1642

2240 i was looking at

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c2/Involute_wheel.gif briefly and noting that they cut the gear teeth short such that the final contact point does not reach the base of the opposing tooth … maybe there are a handful of balanced properties in the animation, like the radii, but it’s notable that with this tooth length, exactly one tooth is pressuring at any point in time

for me, there is a significant portion of the rotation where one gear cannot pressure the other, and that does seem to be where the lasercut version gets stuck. i was thinking the helical shape would fix that by providing other points in the rotation, but i never got a helical one to print with free moving parts yet

…

i found

https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:53451 where there is an existing parametric print-in-place helical gear bearing that has been remixed over 6,000 times. hadn’t found it before. theoretically there is openscad source code somewhere

but i’m thinking the idea of having the helical property help the rotation seems good, but i should also figure out my tooth radii.

the files of thing 53451 include a .scad

there are customizer apps online that let users reparameter scad files :)

2307 device going very slowly, hard to engage material

the attached file is the source from thingiverse above and is _not_ made by karl. not sure whether my laptop runs openscad at this time …

2312