Meccano helical gear cutter

This is a homemade machine built almost entirely out of meccano, used to cut meccano helical gears (14 teeth up to 35 teeth) out of a brass blank cut previously on a lathe. The machine is mounted at 45 degrees angle on the table of a regular horizontal milling machine. Before the cut, the table was initially adjusted to center the blank on the cutter, and then locked-in. The meccano machine does all the work. It uses two stepper motors, one for feeding the blank into the rotating gear cutter, the other motor to rotate the blank. The motors are synchonized with electronics, to achieve a 45 degree cutting angle. This angle could be changed by programming, if needed. The whole process is automatic; the blank is fed to the cutter, cutting one tooth at a time, then it is retracted. Then, the built-in dividing head rotates the blank 1/14 of a turn in this video, (because we are cutting a 14 teeth gear), then feeds it again, then retracts, and so on. It takes about 10 minutes to cut a 14 teeth gear. It took me 2 months to build and tune-up the meccano model, and about 2 weeks to build the custom electronis out of Microchip microprocessors and public domain stepper motor controllers (LiniStepper, by Roman Black). The end result is a gear that can be used in a meccano model. This is meccano making meccano.

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• Meccano
• Milling
• gear
• helical
• microchip
• PIC
• Linistepper
• homemade
• stepper
• motor

[DieEisenschmied]

Incredible, absolutely incredible; I wouldn't have even thought it was possible to make workable fixturing from meccano. This deserves some sort of meccano builder's award!

[KevinByrne2]

Unbelievable. You should win the Meccano version of the Nobel prize. (My dad was in the machine tool business before he retired. He'll love this.)  Thanks for posting this.

[philpem]

Wow, this is an awesome bit of engineering work... and built almost entirely out of Meccano, too. Very cool.

[smackbabie]

speechless... just awsome work.