We’ve seen plenty of people 3D printing custom gears over the years, but [Mr Innovative] decided against an additive process for his bespoke component. He ended up using a simple CNC machine that makes use of several components that were either salvaged from a 3D printer or produced on one. Using a small saw blade, the machine cuts gear teeth into some plastic material and — presumably — could cut gears into anything the saw blade was able to slice into, especially if you added a little lubrication, cooling, and dust removal.

If you’ve built a 3D printer, you’ll see a lot of familiar parts. Stepper motors, aluminum extrusion, straight rods, bearing blocks, and rod holders are all used in the build. There’s also a lead screw and the associated components you usually see in a printer’s Z-axis. Naturally, an Arduino drives the whole affair.

The saw blade was custom-made from a washer, grinding an edge and using a 3D printed template to cut teeth in it. We might have been more inclined to use a cut-off wheel from a rotary tool, but this certainly did the trick. An LCD accepts the gear diameter and number of teeth. The stepper rotates the correct number of degrees and another stepper lowers the cutting head which is spinning with a common DC motor.

As impressive as this machine is, the fact remains that a 3D printer can produce more complex designs. For example, a herringbone pattern can help with alignment issues. It has been done many times. You can even use a resin printer, although you might prefer to stick with FDM.

That’s interesting but those aren’t involute shaped gear teeth, so they won’t properly mesh with anything. While it’s possible to make a form cutter to approximate involute teeth, those are typically only good for a small range of gear teeth of a particular pitch.

If he had coordinated a slide for the cutter he could have generated usable gear teeth with a flat-sided tapered cutter. So, maybe the 2.0 version?

“We might have been more inclined to use a cut-off wheel from a rotary tool,”

Adding to three_d_dave’s comment, you need to be able to cut with the appropriate tooth profile. While I’m sure it’s possible to make your own gear cutter with the correct profile, and I know this isn’t BuyADay.com, but there is a set on amazon for ~$20. Bonus if your gear cutter machine takes standard gear cutter tools making it easier to cut different gears.

FDM 3D printed gears are ok if the gears are big enough, but for smaller gears the resolution isn’t really there. Great to see a solution which could allow making smaller gears at home.

I think I’d just use a regular slitting saw and turn this method into a CNC algorithm:

agreed 110% on this. Either do the way that HAD posted with the crappy sponsered clickbait youtube video and cut out awesome gears that will never work in anything or do it the correct way the first time and have usable gears. I really do not see this as a hack or even a gear cutter more of an indexed cutter. If it would have been posted as an indexing machine of sorts then it would have been both accurate and possibly useful to someone.

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