cuadue / laser_gears

Web application to generate a gear profiles suitable for laser cutting

Laser Gears generates simple circular involute gears in 2d to be cut by a laser printer. It aims to be fast, simple, and stand alone.

Live Demo

It depends on Raphael.js to generate the SVG, which can conveniently be displayed in a browser. Ideally this means we can extract an SVG document from the very image displayed in the browser, but that piece of tech isn't built yet and it doesn't appear to be entirely straight-forward.

The originator of this project has zero mechanical engineering background, but based upon very limited experience, these things were difficult:

• Existing tools are slow or embedded into CAD applications, making the process opaque and complicated.
• Relative sizing of the gears was not preserved. This is easily fixed by placing all the gears on one page.
• To account for laser tolerance is impractical.

Mechanical engineering references

• Lucas
• Carter Tools
• Involute Gear Basic
• Design of Nonstandard Gears

MIT Licensed