Fabricating wood gears

kb58

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So I'm getting an itch to make a wooden clock (which traditionally use wood gears). I've watched a lot of videos and read how people do it, but thought I'd ask here. Here are some of the various methods I found, arranged with the suspected quality from okay to best:
  1. Cut them out entirely by hand (via scroll saw)
  2. Use a router somehow, most likely with a pattern piece, but then there's how to make that...
  3. Drill holes at the gear roots, then cut the sides with a band saw or scroll saw.
  4. Drill the above holes using a mill's DRO feature of holes-on-center.
  5. Use a rotary table and appropriately sized end mill as a router bit
  6. Use a dividing head and the proper gear cutter in a mill (though I don't know how well it would work on wood)
  7. Give up on wood gears altogether and do #6 with brass
Okay, any other methods that I'm missing? The thing is, I want to build one clock for starters, then decide if it's something I want to get into. At the moment, I have a mill, but no dividing head, gear cutters, or scroll saw.

What say you?
 
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Gear cutters would give you the best form to the tooth. You might be able to get away without the dividing head if you got creative with fabricating an index plate, or use one of those 5C spindex for $50 or so. Depends on the size of the gear. Large dinner plate sized flat gears would be best to be CNC routed, or cut on a bandsaw, small gears I would do on a rotary setup on the mill. I would think a fine grain hardwood would do OK with a metal cutting gear cutter at top speed. Totally depends on the size I think.
 
Not sure about wooden clock works, but brass clocks use cycloidal gear tooth forms rather than the typical involute gears used in most other mechanical transmissions. Cycloidal cutters are expensive.

David
 
Shows what I know; there's a whole world concerning gear shapes.

About the CNC router, yeah if I had one of those, I wouldn't have posted! Completely forgot to list it, too, yet ironically, I was just looking at CNC router kits. At this time though, going that way is hard to justify since I have no idea if I'd make more than one clock@
 
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A CNC router would be the most painless way to go. Small routers capable of cutting 1/8" to 1/4" plywood are available for less than $200. https://www.banggood.com/search/cnc-router-machine.html. There are a number of web sites which offer the gear patterns as dxf files and/or the G code for cutting the gears. The router would be useful for other things such as cutting the clock faces and framing as well.
 
If you just want to try them, I'd be happy to run some wood gears on the CNC.
 
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