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30 Uniflex Straight Bevel and Face Gear Manufacturing

30.1 Introduction

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When the face width is large, the curved Coniflex cutter outline causes, in ad-
dition to the curved root line, an hourglass shaped root fillet, which also could
lead to flank mutilations, in particular in the center of the teeth [1]. Gleason
R&D recently developed a new combination between Coniflex or Coniface [2]
and Unimill [3] where the cutter performs a swing or stroke motion along the
face width. The new process combination is called “Uniflex”. The Uniflex pro-
cess utilizes the standard Unimill software which allows entering as cutting tool
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a peripheral Coniflex Plus cutter head. The Uniflex motion guides the Coniflex
cutter such that it moves along the silhouette of a much larger peripheral cut-
ter. With this motion it is possible to use in the design calculation of a straight
bevel gear set or a face gear a virtual cutter with a diameter of 2 meters or
more. The Uniflex motion makes the real cutter which has a diameter of e.g.
15” follow the virtual cutter and envelope the virtual cutter’s surface. The result
is the perfect root fillet and the authentic Coniflex spherical involute or a per-
fect second order involute in the case of Coniface.

Another application of Uniflex is the extension of the machine limits. In many
cases of large miter straight bevel gears the Coniflex cutter sits virtually on top
of the gear or pinion and adds the cutter radius times the sin of 45° (0.707) to
the mean work piece radius as a vertical machine axis travel. If in the case of
large miter parts which require a 15” diameter Coniflex cutter head the Phoe-
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nix Y-axis limit is exceeded, the Uniflex process often presents the solution.
Instead of a 15” Coniflex cutter, a 9” cutter in combination with the Uniflex pro-
cess can be used, which extends the machine capability regarding vertical axis
travel by 3inches or 76.2mm.

An overview of the possible combinations between the original processes for
spiral bevel and hypoid gear bevel gears, straight bevel gears and face gears
with the Unimill process is shown in Table 1. Please note that always when a
disk cutter is applied for straight bevel gears or face gears the process is
called “Uniflex” although the standard Unimill software is used. The application
of Coniflex cutters for the manufacturing of Coniflex or Coniface gears utilizing
a swing motion has reached such a momentum in the industry, that it seemed
useful to create a separate name for this process and tool combination in order
to identify the correct process attributes.

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