At 10:09 PM 8/12/03, you wrote:
>I believe Kozo Hiraoka tells how to make the gears in his book on the
>Climax and it is back in print from Village Press Publications.
>Ian
Ian and all,
There is a tendency to say "Kozo shows you how" thus implying that he's
devised a simple technique which will allow anyone to do it easily, but
that's not always the case. I've had a look at the Climax series to
refresh my memory and found two additional articles on gear cutting which
appeared in the July and August 1983 issues of Live Steam, also by Kozo.
These were apart from the Climax articles which discribed cutting skew
bevel gears.
All of these articles are superb and although he explains and illustrates
it all clearly the complex geometry required to produce anything other than
simple spur gears can't be avoided. The part that will cause most Ga1
people problems is that as size decreases the relative effect of errors (in
geometry, dimensions, tolerances, etc) on the mechanism, and the skill and
precision needed to counteract these effects, increases. For instance the
cutters Kozo discribes have complex geometry, some critically angled or
radiused segments may be only .020" long, and that's in 3/4" scale. The
increased potential for error causes the job to become more difficult,
maybe only slightly, but more difficult just the same and many of us are
pushing our skills and tooling to their limits as it is.
On the other hand, we are helped by having greatly reduced dynamic forces
so that a small error in geometry or misalignment will still operate just
fine and won't cause the components, such as a gear set, to chew or flog
itself to bits in operation. I'd like to see an attempt at skew bevel
gears in Ga1 a la Kozo but I'm afraid that's not on the horizon for me.
Regards,
Harry
