Gearbox 

The following project highlights my technical Solidworks skills as well as my capability of creating a functioning gearbox via a 3D printer. This was a team based project that included four individuals and was for our second year mechanical design course.

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After a highly iterative design process, many candidate designs were compared and the final design was chosen.

The final design was a self-supporting right-angled gearbox with two gears, similar to that of an industry standard reduction gearbox (Figure 1). A pair of Straight-tooth Bevel gears were used to obtain a 3:1 reduction ratio

(Video 1), in which the driving gear had 20 teeth while the driven gear had 60 teeth. Higher quality gears were used since our gearbox was of a simplistic design. 

 

Since the design had to be 3D printed, specific considerations were made. For example, bushings had to be used to connected to two shafts instead of bearings as they can be printed easily. Furthermore, the housing was made as one rectangular piece to increase its stability. However, it had to be of a smaller size to accommodate for the longer print time of a closed housing. Nonetheless, cutouts within the housing were introduced to reduce the printing time but also allow the gears to be assembled via press fit (Figure 2). 

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A step by step method on the assembly of the gearbox can be found here.