Planetary Gear
Made this on the Nomad, it’s quite small at 75mm x 75mm (roughly 3" x 3") so it’s a fun project to run on some scrap wood. I used some 1/4" thick maple, but the dimensions are not that important, you’ll end up with 3 layers once assembled.
I had to start by researching Planetary Gears, got lost in the math of trying to calculate gear dimensions, tooth pitch, tooth count, etc. Ended up finding an ~okay~ gear simulator here, mixed those results with some photos, and edited that in photoshop. Once I had the 8 gears (don’t want to use the word ‘designed’), more like ‘hacked’ together I then imported into Carbide Create.
The results where then tweaked, top and bottom holders were designed which resulted in this…
The design for the top and bottom (right side of the model) were constrained to what hardware I could find, pocket holes for the nuts and screw heads. I have mixed feelings regarding the use of tabs in this project. Assembly took longer because of the tabs, next time I will probably remove the tabs from the model and use lots of tape. However if you scale this design up to a larger size the tabs may be a better route.
Assembly was easy, in photoshop I was able to eyeball how the gears would fit, and had reduced the size of the six planet gears which resulted in a nice loose fit once CNC’d.
Planetary Gear.c2d (2.9 MB)
This may end up as my goto project to use up scraps left over from other projects. This entire planetary gear could end up as one planet-gear within a larger planetary gear… hmmm.