Remember to set the invert flag, which makes the gears rotate in opposite directions. Use the copy-rotation constraint on gears acted upon by others.Use rotation limits to only allow rotation around the gear’s rotational axes.You can simulate gear movement in Blender by adding constraints to the gear meshes you generated:
Import the stl in your slicer software (I commonly use Cura).Use Blenders export stl feature to export your gear models to.There you can set the required gear parameters, which then will be used to generate a gear mesh. However, for reasons of efficiency, I went looking for automatic gear-generators.Īfter trying out a few, I ended up using the great Blender Addon GearGenMaster by Sergey Drachev ( view on GitHub or download from here).Īfter installing the Addon, you will be able to find the generator in the menu under Add > Mesh > GearGenMaster. Modeling gears in BlenderĪfter understanding gears, you could just go ahead and model one yourself. For more details on gear terminology, see the gear-nomenclature Wikipedia article. The gear-ratio (calculable by dividing the gear’s radii) between two gears of the same module determines the amount by which the gear’s rotational speed is reduced or increased, which decreases the gear’s force.Īlso good to know: the angle of pressure is the angle at which the gear’s teeth meet. The so-called working-depth is the gear’s teeth height plus the gear’s clearance. If two gears are intermeshed, this is the distance between the gear’s base circle (the gear without teeth) and the other gears teeth. The second most important parameter for 3D-printing gears is the gear’s clearance. M = n / r # Module = Teeth / radius Code language: PHP ( php )