What I like most about this channel is that degree of difficulty or complexity are not deterrents. Spur gears, gear hobs, worm gears, taps, jumbo fly cutters that make other machinists run away are taken up as a challenge.
Or just use a cnc lathe. I mean, its cool from a romantic nostalgic point, but with the cheapness of cnc setups now, even your smallest shops have access to cnc lathes.
I'm like 98% certain that this channel is just "I Did A Thing"when he feels like being serious. Also I just realized one of the main reasons I love your videos. Not only are they very well-filmed and edited, educational, and entertaining, but you don't do all the bullshit "RU-vidr" stuff with all the "smash the subscribe button" stuff that everybody hates.
You did a good job there. One thing you didn't mention, the hob you made has subtly different dimensions to the worm as it has to cut the gaps between the teeth and the gaps are thinner at the root than the width of the top of the tooth. Otherwise, well done! You've just gone through the same learning curve I went through when the worm drive in my bandsaw packed up. Couldn't find an off the shelf spare, so it was DIY time, making a new worm and worm wheel using the free hobbing method like you did.
Yeah, after all these video's, and all the machines and accessorries he has bought for it I'm really shocked he still hasn't bought a metal bandsaw. Or hell, he could have even made one himself, they're only moderately difficult to make, and especially for the bigger models it's a lot cheaper to make them yourself as well.
Yeah, i´m wondering every time why he doesn´t take the 100,- € into hand to buy, for example, a "Parkside" metal bandsaw. And if it is on sale it is just about 69,- €. Or a cheap one out of Amazonia. The sweat and tears with the hacksaw would kill me. And that cheap one is good enough. Especially when Arti will have customized it. What he would do - that´s for sure. Maybe we should fundraise one for him?
Excellent approach!!! Gears were the first insights into computing. Today they are united. One commands the other obeys. Perfect! All that was missing was the calculations for all this to happen. São Paulo-Brazil!
Very practical on what a small shop can do. I always love discussions on what is enough and how much precision do we really need for the job. Looking forward to seeing what you are going to use this skill for.
In my limited experience with materials of all sorts, I've found cutting has to go in two speeds. Slow and meticulous, or as fast in a steady as possible. I would argue you're at the slow end, but only out of pure ignorance in making gears. Glad to see someone keeping this knowledge alive, the gear IS a massive gain in work, and a good gear set is months of labor saved.
Thank you for the great production of the video and the topic covered. You were very happy to use "DIAL Marker for threads" as an example. There are mechanical turners who do not know and do not know how to use this "DIAL to make thread" system.
The ol' worm drive, it has so much power. That was worth being late to work. "I was late because I let a worm drive." They probably won't think it's funny either.
Thank you for you cut scenes that show real-world stuff like all the adjustments to center something in a 4 jaw chuck. It helps us know that you operate in the same world we do.
One thing you can do to cheese worm gears is to make the large gear by holding it with bearings and then use a tap as an endmill to cut the gear shape. As the threads cut the blank it rotates and you feed in SLOWLY. Once you have good engagement its done. Then you can use the threads as the small gear.
Great video showing the various ways to make a worm gear in the home shop! I like the second method, gnashing the gear and then using the hob to cut final depth. I make these for positioning applications. For higher tooth count worm gears a standard tap works great in place of a custom made hob. For 180 and 120 tooth worm gears a 3/8-24 or 3/8-16 tap is my preferred hob. I started this only really to say that anyone making a worm gear that gnashing with the dividing head is a must before hobbing. You'll cut more teeth than wanted on the gear if you skip this step and make a mess of thin This puts the ratio off and also makes and the tooth spacing incorrect. I just bought Steve wards rotary controller (world of ward). It's incredible. It's about $230 US and all you need to buy is a $20 nema 23 stepper motor and machine a mount for it to suit your dividing head/rotary table. You get 0.005 degree accuracy and can divide a circle by upto 9999. You can also move by degrees to two decimal places. You can machine radius or cut circles as well. It has 4 or so preset selectable options for rotary control plus ones you can program from the keypad for custom applications. It's in plain language anyone can understand, no g-code or other difficult to learn languages. I was cutting a gear 15 minutes after i had the steppet motor mounted and wired. It has a second output that allows you to add any size driver and stepper motor to add an x, y or z axis that you can use in combinatiom with the rotary stepper motor. It can also be configured as a rotary axis if you needed a bigger driver and motor for your rotary application (think 4ft rotary table). The second axis can also be used as a spindle drive to give you timed spindle and rotary axis so you can use a real gear hobbing cutter to make proper worm gears. I'm even using it with a stepper motor on the x axis of my tool and cutter grinder x axis for surface grinding. You can add two limit switches and turn on/off a brake or fire an air cylinder etc. It's great as a standalone rotary or linear controller but incredible if you use both axis control. I don't speak g-code and had no desire to learn cnc, the "programming". Gear cutting is as simple as entering the desired tooth count and hitting entet. You simply hit go to advance to next cut. Add the stepper to axis and add limits and you can program/automate the entire gear cutting process. The manual makes it easy to wire and use the unit. I had no prior stepper motor experience and basic electrical knowledge. He gives all the support you need and you can even buy tje components and build itself yourself for far less $$$. Of, enough of this ramble!!
Awesome! You're an inspiration bud, love the channel! Every time i watch you quench something though, I cringe a little in how small a container you use for quenching. Maybe it doesn't matter, but in the knives I make, the oil heats up so fast in a small container that I don't get as good results as a huge oil bath. Have you ever tried a bigger container with more volume for quenching? Was there any notable difference? I watch every week, Roger from Calgary.
Thats some impressive work for sure! Another thing that also amazes me about worm gears in general is that they last as long as they do. The thing being that in constast to other gearbox types where the gears just roll over each other, with worm gears you have a lot of sliding going on between the screw and the gear. Sure worm gears are filled with some good quality oil adapted specificially for worm gears but still I would expect a worm gearbox to have a much shorter lifespan because of the sliding motion. A real world example from me is the metal bandsaw at my workplace wich uses a worm gear drive. The drive motor on the saw and thus also the screw spins at 3000 rpm with slam on direct start sometimes starting and stopping 100s of times during a workday. We got the machine in 2004 and it still show no signs of wear on the gearbox after 20 years of operation. At least I cant hear any different noises or notice any backlash still on the machine.
Very neat , must buy some involute gear cutters some time , ive seen people rough hob gears using a Tap before, seems like some thrust washers would be just the job to let the blank spin.
I came across a strange worm gear set up on an old OZITO electric chainsaw the worm gear set up was the motor shaft a 12mm metric thread driving a gear at 90 deg for the oil pump, it was defiantly a 12 mm metric thread as a 12mm nut was holding on a spacer on the end, the gear was made out of steel and had the helical profile, I thought it was odd until I saw this Video and how you made your own helical cutter , I guess the Chinese have mastered it.
Cutting normal thread on a lathe is already somewhat of a challenge, at least as small as this one. When I learned lathe the only thread I cut with a chisel on a lathe was a trapezoid moving gear on a 4 cm diameter blank steel rod. The worm is not really a problem if your lathe lets you choose the correct values, but the gear is the major hurdle. You could cut every tooth with a mill when you set the table to the gradient/slope (idk the correct word in english for this) of the worm so it fits, but then you'd have to rotate it. Or you could build a little helper. Precut every tooth with a normal thread cutter so you have the perfect gradient. Then mount it on an angle with a tiny spring that grips into the little valleys so you can mill another tooth at the exact position, combined with a quick span of course so the mill doesn't rip it apart. And then at the end you cut a round depression into it with the lathe. That requires of course that the piece is a bit wider so you can still put it into a chuck, and then cut the gear off.
yes it would be better can also use a double nut setup to lock the nut in place so it doesnt tighten or loosen on its own , ideally youd use a thrust on both ends
Man watching you make the worm just reminds me about how fucking amazing human engineering is some times. Like, just look at what a Lathe can do, it retracts the cutter and moves it backwards while spinning everything in reverse and spins normally when its realigned for screw teething. Absolute math went into making them, along with all the addons like the reducer and just the gear ratios inside them to do different things.
There is a great DVD from the early 1990s tritled "Making gears the easy way" , that every hobby machinist should either watch or preferably own a copy of. It covers an array of gear setups with simplified math, and machining setups/techniques for both lathe and mill. Just as I'd recoment Machinery's Handbook and the DVD set "Lathe Learnin' " for the beginning metal turner, I would recommend Making geras the easy way for anyone foraying into gear cutting and hobbing.
Great video! One idea for the gear tensioning: Use thrust washers below and above the gear your cutting and a simple plate spring (idk if it’s the correct term, translated from German) to tension the gear :) Reduce the spacer height by the thickness of one thrust washer obviously tho. Might be useful if you’re planning on cutting more worm gears in the future.
Well done. I usually dont comment. I often click off part way through. This is the best, educational, least obnoxious, interesting, sensible, potentially useful, out of the box, unusual topic, that you have ever attempted. To get credit from me, you can be proud of this video. I hope its quality can be carried forward.
Making gears out of worms *is* rather difficult. Worms, of course, are squishy, wiggly, and don't want to hold a particular shape (other than, of course, worm shaped). Once made, they also don't wear very well. 😜
Maybe you could just cut a slanted gear and lap the gear in? ie. make an aluminum screw and use that with some abrasive to lap the gear to the right profile. I think that would be a cool experiment at least and I think would be easy to do in a home shop
Hi, you’re very smart, keep that green book! It is full of information! Being a fitter/turner isn’t about remembering everything it’s about being able to find the information you need at the time! Great video once again! Side note I lost my green book ten years ago when I moved from WA back to NSW 😢
at tafe we make a 4 start worm gear in the horizontal mill, with the shaft that connects the two. a four start thread is mad complicated, especially because it he helix is so long compared to its rotation, so the cutter is working hard to machine it
12:00 Feels like cutting and bending a tab on your copper softener jaws to retain them during loading/unloading material would be a nice, but simple upgrade.
If you put a encoder on the one axis of your mill, and a stepper motor on the dividing head, you could do an electronic connection between the 2. Many people have done it. It's like a variant of an electronic lead screw on a lathe
16:40 I would think if instead of using the long axis, one can just use the in/out axis to cut the worm gear profile… It will cut an inward concave groove in sort of the same way a proper worm gear is. The only real problem is the radius of the cutter, which can be solved by using a custom rotating cutter with an adjustable depth, similar principle to a fly cutter but specific for the application. A makeshift one made from a broken boring bar with a carbide tip ground to profile might be the ticket, though not adjustable unless mounted on a boring head. Though, 22:30 is also one smart way to do it
To help with finding useful pitches, I use a simple spreadsheet that calculates the effective pitch for all combinations of change gears I have. For a given pitch, I usually find a combination that gets within 0.01%.
Idea: Make a lathe chuck backplate with teeth cut into its perimeter so you can turn it with a worm like a rotary table, eliminating the need for an indexing head while also adding the ability to mill in polar coordinates using a mini spindle on the cross slide.
I know the hobbing setup is ideal, but couldn’t you instead machine a radius into the gear OD, then cut the teeth at an angle by tilting the dividing head? That’s how my milling machine fine feed worm gear was machined after the factory one broke its teeth.
Straight cut or with the actual radiused profile, it's still a worm wheel. That radius is used most times (but not always) when the drive loads get higher or better tooth longevity would be helpful. So in reality, it all depends on what the worm and worm wheel were designed to do and for how long. And fwiw, all threads and gears can't ever be made to be "perfect" if your metrology to measure them is accurate enough. What that's normally referred to is there lead and lag pitch errors. Moore Tools in the U.S. spent massive amounts of money in effort to produce as close to perfect lead screws and nuts for their jig borers and grinders before very high accuracy dro's and then cnc were invented by grinding and then precision lapping. There final errors in thread pitch weren't out by much, low millionths of an inch in fact. But they were still there no matter how much time, effort and money they invested. Luckily and for us when used in something like a rotary table or dividing head, any pitch errors are divisible by the gear ratio between the worm and worm wheel. So the accuracy can be much better than the worm and wheel itself.
Great video mate! I would like to ask you how often do you use that Hemmingway die, holder, you made some time ago and please give your honest opinion if you think it is worth me making one. Thanks so much mate
You can use a similar process with a plastic gear, but not cutting, instead thermoforming it. Instead of a cutting hob just use the worm itself, and heat the outside edge of the plastic gear blank then using force, push the worm into the gear while it is spinning then friction will keep the outside of the gear soft enough without the heat gun and you can finish thermoforming the plastic gear to exactly match the worm. Plastic worm gears are very popular because they are quiet, and can have no backlash because in the final adjustment they are tight and use elastic deformation of the gear (instead of a metal gear and worm which need a fixed clearance because there is no elastic deformation).
I have the smaller CALOR GAS bottles here in Dublin, IRE. I have about 10 of them and I'm weary about taking the head valve off. How do u know if there is no more GAS left in the bottles. The ones I have have been sat in a shed for 20 or more years. Some of them have someth in them bcos I feel it moving inside the bottle. Any advice would be greatly appreciated. I want to build a stove for my workshop. It's bloody freezing in the winter and I'd love to be able to heat it up then. Great video but the tool u made is beyond me pal.. LOL What would be the best wrench to take the valve off with? I enjoyed the video. It's a bit hazy in the picture though mate. Maybe the lighting is off a wee bit bt I still enjoyed ur video anyways..
My first worm gears where a complete mess, especially because they were for an architectural feature (opening large windows in an industrial setting) and i really wanted to make them myself when i probably should've farmed that work to a professional. :)) Years later i figured that i could've bought a pump reduction for oil type pumps, which had the exact size and large brass gears i wanted.
Interesting video and great work. That straight cutted gears become really noisy, and the inacuraccies between the teeth add up with every additional gear. A worm gear has lot of advantages (self-locking) and disatvanteges (friction, extremly high w&t when high forces are transmitted) - so its uses are very limited. So ......one of your next projects maybe could be some helical toothed gears? Perfect to reduce noise and clattering.
Gashing isn't just "commonly used", it's absolutely necessary for cutting worm gears. If you don't gash, you will get a different number of teeth to what you expect, and many will be malformed. Ask me how I know. As a matter of principle, you should form the outside of the gear on the lathe with a form cutter (this gets you a properly formed wheel rather than relying on the free hobbing to kinda sorta do it for you), and then gash coming in (on your setup) on the Y axis rather than the X which reduces the overcutting you may otherwise see on the outside of the gear teeth. You don't need much gashing, just enough to get the hob to engage. Another challenging gearset for the tool-inhibited is bevel gears. They're a whole heap of fun to cut.
Very interesting read. I was under the impression that that gashing wasn’t absolutely necessary when it came to cutting works on universal driven set ups.
@@artisanmakes Ah, my bad. Should have said "free hobbing". If you've got a universal (or CNC equivalent) dividing head, you're right, it's unnecessary. That said, most of my old literature covers free hobbing as a preferable approach to buggering about with universal dividing heads - the head itself is costly and relatively complicated to set up, and I believe the hobs used are different. I might well be wrong on that last bit, though.
0:41 seems like you did not get the disc perfectly centered? the let side looks a bit smaller eg. than the right bottom? Certainly it might be okay for your application, when I made gears some time ago I ran into those issues I need a 10micrometer tolerance on mine...
Great work! I didn't expect the gear wheel to be the complex bit, but I should have guessed. Would a thrust bearing help with holding the gear blank down on the hobbing setup? It should allow tight workholding with a lot less rotational resistance?
60 to 1 reduction in speed doesn't necessarily means 60 times increases in torque. Actually worm gears have much lower efficiency. Thanks for your great content.
I enjoyed that! I know you made it out aluminium but that should work in steel as well? Cutting a shallow profile and letting the helical cutter di the rest?
I use actual taps as a free hobb cutter. Then i make the worm with a long enough bolt with the same commonly available thread pitch or from drill rod blanks. Works for most things I create anyway 👍 great video, it inspired me to make up a few worm gear sets ! Thanks 😊
I was going to comment on that as well. The live center or something in the tail stock or possibly both are enough to be noticeable by eye in the video as the tool starts to cut. So somethings definitely not right.
Hi Artisan, I'm about to buy the same Sieg 2.7L as yours. Since the First video you made about you price increased from 1500 aud to 2450 aud. Should i still consider buying It or do you think the price Is still excessive for It? I still cannot find a good One in the market with the same dimension and caracteristics. Please let me know your opinioni id like to buy a good machine for the right price. Also It It was good, what platform do you suggest to buy It from? Thank you
I was going to ask why we cant just use a cutting tap, but I think you basically covered it. Because the worm wheel is not only slanted but also curved, I believe is your reasoning, which makes sense to me. I guess if we wanted to make a non proper worm wheel, i.e. the slanted but not curved kind, we could simply use a cutting tap, and perhaps make some backups for when they wear. Despite the value and entertainment of this video, which it def has, that still seems like a great option for a non lathe home garage project. Thanks for sharing, very nice video. Edit .. wait, the curve is on top of the tooth? I thought it was a curved slant. So, basically, the proper worm wheel is exactly the same as the cutting tap worm wheel except it has a curve cut into the top of each tooth? If so, seems the wear pattern would work to make the non proper worm wheel become a proper worm wheel over time. Am I missing something?
Ah yes, I should have covered that but I chose not to. The helix I am referring to, is that the tooth itself is slanted back and curved. The curve that you can see is called the throat of the worm wheel. This would be called a throated worm wheel. If you look up on google you can see the difference between a non throated and throated gear. On the subject of the tap, if you mean using a normal thread tap to make the gear, yes you could but it would be a different profile angle
@@artisanmakes Well, you cant cover everything in a single video. Thanks for addressing here. I think I get what you are saying .. its difficult to describe 3 dimensional complex shapes in words 🙂It was difficult to see in the video, but I can tell now from still pictures that as you say they are curved forward. Very interesting, thank you. I bought a cheap non throated worm gear and 60T wheel set, didnt even know at the time about throatedness. It is small and will drive a small door, will only turn 1/4 turn each time and the worm gear only goes 10 rpm. Hopefully it will suit this purpose for long enough. But, either way, now bc of this video I know the difference, and can choose inexpensive non proper gear for home made gear or cheaper ones to buy, vs proper gears when it matters more. Thanks for the information, super helpful. Best regards to you.
15:40 It seems like some sort of divice to press in pins would be useful. I don't know but a fly press comes to mind. Think you could build something like that? ;)
I have a silly question regarding making the helical shape on gear (not a machinist here, just a curious viewer): What if one were to take a round (tube shaped) file and fit it into tool holder of the lathe and slowly grind the profile onto the gear turning on lathe's chuck?
The helical shape is to do with the tooth profile itself. The tooth curves backwards, instead of being straight. The concavity you are referring to is the throat of the gear.
