Page 417 - Gear Technology Solutions

job variety for an optimal consolidation. The new Gleason consolidation soft-
ware allows all possible combinations between the pinion and gear cutters of
existing jobs with the new jobs.

Figure 12: Comparison of original TCA and TCA after consolidation

29.8 Summary

Cutter head or blade consolidation of the past was difficult, mostly manual
work. The results were not optimal and in many cases the consolidation of a
chosen job variety was impossible. Especially face hobbing jobs presented ob-
stacles which were difficult to overcome. The reason lies in the complex face
hobbing cutter head and blade geometry. This geometry is the result of the
kinematic relationship between the rotating workpiece and the rotating cutter
which additionally rotates around a virtual generating axis.

The consolidation strategy presented in this paper first establishes the precise
mathematical knowledge of the geometric and kinematic relationships of all
cutters in the consolidation variety simultaneously. The developed program
analyzes those relationships for all the pinion cutters and for all gear cutters at
the same time. Certain changes in a pinion blade might be acceptable if com-
plementary changes can be implemented in the gear blade. The CONSOLID
software materializes on those relationships in order to achieve a consolidated
cutter variety which preserves the original physical properties of the individual
jobs.

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