Our April 2023 Tool of the Month is this 3/4″ Ø Carbide 4-flute gear cutter.
Our customer is a repair shop and was asked to manufacture a duplicate helical gear that came out of a very old machine. Pictured is the customer milling an aluminum test piece on his vertical mill with a home made helical gear attachment. Below is the actual damaged gear. Without any gear specs or print, we were able to reproduce the gear form accurately by having the customer supply us with a thin wafer-like cutout of the actual gear form. From there we mounted the wafer on our Zoller tool inspection machine which generated a .dxf of the spline tooth form. This .dxf was then loaded into our ANCA grinding software. With this abililty, the tool came out within .0003″ of the actual part form, enabling our customer to machine an exact duplicate of the gear!
