How would you make a gear
-
I'm sure there are quicker ways so I'll ask. I made a 1/4 of the gear, copy/paste/flip, then copy/paste/flip both for the full gear. I had to make each tooth for the first quarter though. Is there a way to make 1 or 2 teeth, then copy/paste them, but they follow the curve of the circle?
-
Hi Mike,
It's called "Radial array" and you can fin a description of it somewhere at the middle of this page.
Simply make a circle (or polygon) with the desired number of segments/sides and using the center of the circle/polygon, make one tooth of the gear and use the Rotate tool combined with the Ctrl key to Copy/Rotate it around. You can even make the tooth a component first thus saving file size.
Note that you can do the same for linear arrays with the Move tool
-
Thats pretty neat, thanks. It also reminded me of my next problem. When I'm doing a negative push/pull, I can never type in a negative number. No matter what I type with or without the - my result is always a positive. Is there something I'm missing?
-
Hm.I just tried and negative numbers seem to work no matter which direction I start the P/P operation.
-
Hi Mike,
Another approach to make gears is to use the free Involute Gear plugin, available here: http://ohyeahcad.com/download/index.php
It has worked well for me. One thing to note is that on the download page it says the options will show under the "Tools" menu, but I found that they show up under the "Draw" menu (tested in SketchUp versions 6&7). Hope this helps! -
Its kind of backwards, if I want a negative push and want to use the keypad, I either push in and type a positive number to get a push in, if I type a negative number here it will do a pull. The opposite happens as well, if I do a pull to start with, then negative numbers will do a push and positive numbers will do a pull.
-
Yeah, that's what happens (if I read you correctly).
Advertisement