Automatic Watch Winder / Display

[llwood]

This is Amazing! Love the gears and the hinge!

There is a Gear Maker gadget in the Vectric Gadgets Library. http://gadgets.vectric.com/library.html
Did you use this gadget or did you design the gears yourself?

And, Thanks, Scott for the links to the discussions and the pictures on the ShopBot forum. The pictures and the descriptions are very clear.

That's an amazing project.
--Andy

[Tailmaker]

......There is a Gear Maker gadget in the Vectric Gadgets Library. http://gadgets.vectric.com/library.html
Did you use this gadget or did you design the gears yourself?......

Oh, sorry for the late reply. Have not been here for a while.

The gears are a whole long story. Actually I built a first version of this clock winder with scalloped gears (all tooth surfaces are cylindrical), which is easy to draw and actually worked but not smooth enough. So I started over, using normal involute gear shape, generated by Matthias Wandel's gear generator software (www.woodgears.ca/gear/index.html).

However, I had to tweak the gear shape significantly in CAD so that it can be machined properly with an 1/8" end mill. The gears as they come from the software have too sharp inner corners to fit the bit radius in. What I did was generate gear teeth with maximum allowed addendum and dedendum and then "file" them down in CAD until there was no more interference. It would be nice to have a gear generator that takes bit diameter into account. I got to check out that Vectric gear gadget sometimes.

[FixitMike]

My gear construction method tells you the largest bit diameter that can be used, as well as accounting for the bit clearance. It also provides backlash allowance to provide clearance between gears.
http://forum.vectric.com/viewtopic.php? ... ar#p149251

It does require that you construct the tooth profile (as instructed) rather than doing it for you.

[Tailmaker]

My gear construction method tells you the largest bit diameter that can be used, as well as accounting for the bit clearance. It also provides backlash allowance to provide clearance between gears.
http://forum.vectric.com/viewtopic.php? ... ar#p149251

It does require that you construct the tooth profile (as instructed) rather than doing it for you.

Thanks for the link, Mike! Very useful. That would do the job for my next gear project. Maybe I write a few lines of code sometimes to emulate the method and make dxf or gcode directly.

[FixitMike]

Tailmaker: I would love to have someone make a Gadget out of my method. Lua coding is beyond me, I never got past Visual Basic.