September 2015—17
Mazak Corp., call 859-342-1700
or visit mazakusa.com.
a 20"-long shaft part with a gear pattern at its
center. This means that 10" of the part would
interfere with the machine's milling spindle, and
the gears would have to be hobbed or machined
with special disc mill-type, fat-bottomed cutters.
Those particular cutting tools, similar in
appearance to slotting cutters, typically have
10 or 12 inserts and cut gear teeth profles
one at a time. The tools provide the fexibility
to produce a range of diametral gear pitches,
which is especially applicable to prototyping
and producing very low gear volumes. A power
skiving tool, on the other hand, generates
multiple teeth for a particular diametral pitch
gear. However, the power skiving process is
much faster.
Adding Capabilities Economically
Regardless of the tooling and processes used,
interest continues to grow in cutting gears on
multitasking machines. And many shops involved
in key industries such as heavy equipment,
motorsports and others currently beneft from
doing so for their low- to medium-volume gear
production. Others that beneft are shops that
want to bring gear cutting back in-house, and
those that are simply unable to justify the cost of
replacing worn out existing pieces of dedicated
gear cutting equipment. But, it should be noted
that dedicated gear cutting equipment is not
going away. Multitasking machines simply
provide another option for machine shops doing
smaller batches of gear cutting in addition to
other part-processing operations.