Posted by Jeff (216.12.51.60) on December 08, 2002 at 09:18:07:
In Reply to: Need help with gears posted by Ron Flory on December 08, 2002 at 05:20:21:
: Hello to everyone, I have been reading every posts and many of you have said that the wheel made sounds like thuds or bangs. I think the sounds were just to throw everyone off. People of science would believe the sounds as part of the true machine and common people would believe the machine is not magic or supernatural. An overbalanced wheel operating within a balanced wheel. Anyhow I need some help with my own design. Is thier any simple method for designing gears. I would perfer not to buy gears because I need to tinker with the ratios to keep the brake force constant.
Ron:
I do not agree with you about the sounds. I think they are some of the best clues about the machine.
If you have an autocad program or know an engineer or surveyor that has an autocad program (this might work with Intelicad which was a free download a couple of years ago) go to http://www2.arkansas.net/~millerlr/ Under autocad and other utilities you will find hbmstr_h.zip which is a zip file for a lisp program that runs within autocad 14. It will draw a set of gear teeth at your specifications. Click on the Manufacturing Engineering link to get a magazine article on the hobbing process used. Once you have a single tooth you can use the autocad Array command to place however many teeth you want around whatever size gear you choose.
A site dealing with some examples of gears is: http://www.mech.uwa.edu.au/DANotes/gears/intro/intro.html
Another site with basic info., if you can get by the pop-up adds, is http://www.howstuffworks.com/gear-ratio1.htm
Jeff