welcome to precision gears bringing Involute parametric gears to blender the download links
are down in the description so head on over to makertails.com and then click into the download
section here's a shameless little plug to my new course and i really suggest you go and
check out that pre-sale before it runs out in the download section you'll get a link
that will take you to the gumroad page of precision gears now yes it is a paid add-on
but don't worry there is a free version and i'll tell you all about it in just a moment i did
ask you over in the youtube community how much you'd be willing to pay for something like this
you told me under 10 bucks so here you can put in eight and click i want this and that will work
but if you want to support more precision add-ons in the future and further development on this one
i'd love it if you give me 15 because quality add-on development is surprisingly expensive
speaking of which this is technically still in beta for two main reasons one is there's a lot
more coming out in the next month or so plus even more after that all of this here has already been
implemented and i haven't added the presets just yet and the main reason why is because i don't
know really what presets to add i don't know if you want them from a catalog i don't know if you
want them to be 3d printing specific so go and let me know over in the precision gears channel
over in the discord by clicking here right there now as for this free version you get it
by clicking right here which will take you to the precision gears light this version lets you make
just a spur gear which is the most used gear out there so it's still extremely useful
and is completely parametric just like the other version so all you have to do is put in
a zero here click i want this and that's going to give you it for free now either way they're both
going to give you a zip file so let's go get that installed now heading back to blender it's pretty
simple to install just go to edit preferences go to add-on then install double-click that zip file
that downloaded turn it on and remember you can search it right there and it's that simple to get
this installed now just before we go and make some gears and blender i need to be perfectly
clear that i'm not going to show you how gears work in this one video because that will be far
too much to cover but i will be making it it'll be linked in the card or down in the description
once it's out with that now said let's go and make some gears in blender with precision gears now
installed it's under the add menu so shift a go to mesh go all the way down and you'll see precision
gears there is the rack spur internal bevel and worm we're going to start with a rack one now
do keep in mind that the defaults and the presets are non-existent right this minute
because i need your help because i don't know if i should do them to a catalog or if i should make
them for 3d printing or what so let me know down in the description there is a link to help me out
right there the best place would be over in the discord so now that we've made this let's go and
change this up in some way now you didn't have a dialog box that came up when we first made this
that's because this is driven by its own object properties that's right this is parametric as
can be within blender you can change this on the fly i'm going to go for a 1.5 millimeter module
just know that that's usually about the smallest you can go for 3d printing then let's go for a
width of 10 let's go for a height of 10. i'm also going to change this to cavity i know some of you
don't like it but i'm sorry and it's just easier to see so let's say right here this is a preset
that i wanted to keep all you have to do is click right here we'll should name this as test
one and we'll click ok so if you wanted to make another one i'm just going to go and move the 3d
cursor on the x we're going to create a new spur spur sorry rack gear and then i want to change this
preset over to test and there you have it now we have a rack and i want pinion to go with
it so you might think okay well i'll go over here let's put in the spur gear and then i'll be able
to change this on the presets no because there's a much simpler way to make this work all you have
to do is duplicate this move it out and just say hey if this is a rack i want this to be a spur
and lo and behold you now have a spur gear to go with your rack gear now this spur gear is looking
a little bit plain right this minute so let's go and add some extra stuff to it now it's all down
in here and there's a lot to it so we'll take this nice and slow so we'll start with the extrusion
right this minute it's on bottom and top i'll do an extrusion of five you might not see it because
it's down on the bottom here because we can do it on the bottom and the top so i'll just go just for
the top now here i'm going to give it a radius of five we could put down the resolution all the way
way down to six to get a hex nut of some sort if you really want but i'll go for 64 and leave
that there okay now i want a bore in other words a hole in the top of it of some sort now there's
lots of different types of holes that you can do we've got the cross the round subtract the round
ad and the polygon let's go across nice and simple it's right there very easy to understand we have
the round subtract this one's a little bit harder to understand let's put that to a radius of three
let's give this a resolution of 50 and then let's give this scalar a little bit more size let's move
the position and now you can see where this comes from now you know that these usually need a set
screw and there is a set screw right here we have the set screw we'll turn it on by just turning
this to number one and you'll see that it's teeny tiny right down there if you don't see it click
preview and you'll get a preview of the cutter so there it is so we'll make this nice and big now
let's go for 1.5 radius the offset go up now this isn't linked up to the extrusion because you can
get set screws in the gears themselves sometimes now you might see that things go a little bit
weird sometimes like that right there that's because it is on the fast one if you want to fix
that just go to exact and that will usually fix it now stick with the fast because it'll be working
just fine once i change the angle over here to 90 and there we have it working beautifully and
perfectly okay so we've got that there let me show you that on the board you can also mirror it you
can also get a preview of it now on top of that we also have the round ad now this one's a little bit
different this is what some of you would call a key so we're going to go here change the set screw
to off we're going to change this to a round add and now we're just going to make the scaler
a lot smaller and there we have a nice little key one we'll also move the position in a little bit
and there we have it okay so now that we have that i want to create an internal gear for this gear
here so shift d move this on the x all the way that way and now as you already know all we have
to do is go to type and change that to internal change the teeth amount let's go for 60 and it's
that simple to do that so now we have our rack and pinion we also have our internal gear and
our gear to go and mesh together now just before i show you how much deeper this gets i also just
want to cover quickly how to remove a preset so if we had a preset of that test one all we have
to do is click delete and that is that preset now done okay so we have all of these right here
i've decided that i actually wanted all of these to be helical gears instead so i'm going to
copy them all out go down here you see where it says helix angle i'm going to put in 15 there i'm
going to hold down alt and then hit enter and lo and behold they now all have a helic angle to them
now you know what it wasn't a helix angle that i wanted to do i actually wanted to herringbone all
of these so now that they already have a helix angle to them all i have to do is hold down alt
and click herringbone and now they're all going to be herringboned instead as you can see this is
extremely powerful and super flexible now just before we jump into the bevel and the worm gear
i just want to quickly show you the settings a little bit not really showing you what exactly
they're for and what they do but just where they are sort of a little synopsis of what they do
so we've got the module which is sort of the tooth size then we've got the height which is
pretty self-explanatory the pressure angle which is this right here it's it gets a little bit
more complicated on that one and then we've got the complexity of it this is basically just the
amount of vertices on the teeth themselves and then we've got the shift which sort of
shifts it all i'm just going to set this back to zero and then we've got the head which you
can see the head it's very easy to break this by the way so you've got to keep to real numbers and
then things will not break so we'll just reset that to the default value there then we've also
got the clearance i'm going to set this to zero and this technically right here is what would be
called your standard gear the ones that don't have any clearance whatsoever and it's just straight up
the gear itself so usually for 3d printing these don't work absolutely perfectly you need just
a little bit of a give to them so that there is the settings there's a whole bunch more to it but
let's go and move on to the bevel here in fact i'm going to use this gear because it works best to
create bevel gears with not that much clearance and stuff like that so i'm just going to grab this
we're going to move this over to bevel and lo and behold there it is now it might be a little bit
broken here i'm going to put this back to 1.5 and then i'm going to increase this up to 25 and there
we have a lovely bevel gear right there now bevel gears are very interesting because you can get
quite interesting shapes with them so i'll duplicate this out move this out on the x
we're going to add maybe 50 teeth to it instead so it goes out like this and then we can start
working with the pitch angle so with the pitch angle we can go really quite far with this let's
go all the way down to 60 see what happens so now we've got a 60 degree pitch angle there
let's duplicate this out on the x then let's rotate this on the y by 90 in the other direction
so if we wanted this to mesh with that and be a 90 degree well we know that that's 60 so this
one here needs to be a pitch of 30 so put that to 30 right there and then we can put this all
the way down to maybe 10 oh 10's a bit low let's go down to 20. so now we know that this one has
50 let's make this 25 so if we move this to 25 you can just see how flexible this is i just love it
so we move this here move this like that so now we know that that there is a 90 degree
meshing right this minute it is so powerful now a couple of extra little features that the other
ones don't have because they don't need it is the nice little tooth cleanup right here so we got
tooth trimming and now let's go on to the slightly more complicated one which is the worm gear so i'm
going to duplicate this one move this out this way and now let's go to the worm gear now full
open honesty here i'm still learning worm gears so i could be getting things completely wrong
here but they are very interesting and for those of you that understand them there it's all here
so we'll go to worm gear i'm going to put this all the way down to three teeth i'm then going to
increase the diameter of this by quite some amount i'm also going to increase the height of this
then i'm also going to increase the helix steps to maybe about 50. there we go things are starting to
come together there so we've got that that's looking good so let's just go and change that
extrusion radius the top and bottom increase the radius of this as well and then we have a
lovely worm gear oops i made the radius nothing there that's not what i meant to do let's make
that radius out there we have it so we've got that right there you could add a set screw to
this you can do anything you want so if we had a gear to this right this minute we do not have
worm wheel gears i would love to implement them but my development fund has run dry for that but
in the future i really am planning to add that so right this minute you would have to get yourself
probably this worm gear right here so shift d move this out a little bit this way we would
then change this over to a spur gear we would probably add the teeth that we're
wanting let's go for 25 let's add that height back to 10 and then we would have to figure out
the angle that you would need to pitch this at so maybe it's an angle of 25 or
20 more around there then we can rotate this on the x go by 90 and then we can just move this
all the way to here somewhere then we'll just move this out this way like that and then
it's going to be a little bit of trial and error right this minute but there are
equations for this and like i just said in the future i really am planning to get this to work
once i have some more funding to be able to put in some more money into the development of this
so from here just to show you just quite how parametric this is i've just decided that you know
what all of these here are all wrong i needed to have a different module so i'm going to duplicate
this out move this on the x and be careful these are pretty high mesh things sometimes
and i wanted the module to be two so put in two hold down alt hit enter and now all of those
are going to change to have a module of two i hope you see just how powerful this really
is it is incredible what you can do with this now something that works absolutely brilliantly
with this is my other add-on which is outlined svg so you can create all sorts of
gears that you're wanting to use for laser cutting or cnc or whatever you can then select the gear
itself use outline to svg the link is down in the description completely for free put it where it is
you wanted to export and then hit that export and now you have an svg outline of this for use in cnc
for use in laser cutting you name it you can do it now i do have a little bit extra to show you
but this is of what's about to come and it's not live just yet but the plan is for it to be live
probably in the next few weeks so a few things coming up are better geometry and precreased edges
so that they are more compatible with subdivision modifiers and bevel modifiers a whole bunch of
teeth modification including tapering tapering offsets tip relief tip relief resolution crowning
end relief undercutting
and all of those put together give you an endless world of new possibilities and all that there is
still just the start of it considering you've made it this far along the video i might as well tell
you that i'm even developing an animation part where we'll be able to make gear chains to make
them all work together but that is still in heavy development and we'll see how i get with there
so sign up for some updates over to my newsletter that's also linked down in the description
a huge thank you to my patrons without you i would not have been able to make this add-on
whatsoever i'm just so happy that i'm able to make it as available as possible for all the makers out
there like yourself and if you're enjoying what i'm making here you think i'm worthy of your
support i would love to see you there too and don't forget that we have a discord and that's
linked down in the description thank you for watching keep making and let the quest continue