I'm a newbie to this forum, and still on the bottom end of the learning curve for Sketchup, but I desperately need to get up to speed on making gears. Context is that I'm a Mechanical engineering graduate student working on a special project, which I really only have this week to complete.

The project is a bicycle transmission (hub) that I have designed and sketched on (several sheets of) paper, but I just can't get all the gears drawn in a soft copy that I can hand over to the machine shop to make during semester break, and once Spring classes start, they'll be too busy for student sideline projects.

This is a little more than just a project for me, but something I have been working on for years, and I think it's the biggest leap forward since the original Sturmey Archer AW4 hub, matching that hub in all areas, and bettering it in several. My design is less complicated than a Rohloff, equally efficient mechanically, and automatically shifting by torque, with no ancillary cables. Point is, I need at least some direction on drawing (still somewhat complicated) gears, interfacing in multiple planes, on multiple axis. So far I haven't even been able to get the gear plug-in (Ruby code) to work in Sketchup 8, so I'm rolling backward to 7, but still a little lost in this thing.

Anybody out there done this sort of thing, who might lend a little help and direction. Though I consider my project to be unique and special, from a drawing perspective it's the same as any other bicycle hub (Rohloff, Sachs, SRAM, Shimano, Sturmey Archer, et al.), or even a car transmission. Anybody done something like that?