3D Printed Gears Easy!

Hi folks Your Brazilian friend Guillerme Razgriz here!!

A very common problem when finding the right gear to 3d print is time and getting exakt measurements for a specific model. Obviously it must also work as intended.. 😉

So here are a little list of tools that can help you a lot on this task and a little guide to use them properly:

Gear Generator:

The Gear Generator

The Gear Generator is the best online tool if you really don’t have time or just don’t want modeling, the website also offers an animation so you can see the gear working in real time rendering so you can stop it if you want or increase the RPM as you wish:

So here you can set the values of your gear and see all in real time just after you press “Enter” :

Another good thing here is that you can select the other gears to work on it too and export the final project to SVG format and finish it on a compatible software like Blender.

To access and use the tool just click here.

Thingiverse Customizer

Everyone knows this place, but unfortunately most users just don’t know the existence of som of the great tools like the customizer =]

The customizer allows to take a project and make changes to set it for your purposes! And not only for Gears, but it can make changes on a huge number of projects! So lets find a Gear :

To see If the project is compatible with the App check if the customizer button is visible and present in the page of the thing. If its there, just click on it and the customizer’s will open:

Here we can change the values as we wish, to make the gear and create the stl in one piece!

Gears by Inkscape

Create a functional gear on Inkscape is quite easy, so lets see how to :

If you don’t have it on your machine and use Linux just install the package from your distro, If use windows use the automatic Installer, the Linux packages and the Windows installer are here, at the Inkscape website.

Ok, after install, its time to open the tool, don’t worry, you dont Have to know something about vector drawing, its certainly not a “must” :

Now lets navigate to the extension called ‘Gears” :

Now just put the values that you want, to see the work in progress just click on the “apply” button.

When Ready just save the SVG and go to extrude your project on a 3d software =].

Blender won’t bite !*(Some times heheh)

Yes! Blender can do it too! Its so easy and can be done ASAP, lets see:

First of all, we need to enable the extra meshes in User Preferences here:

Now, go to the “Add-ons” tab and enable the “Mesh Extra Tools:

Finally, to use this tool just use the “SHIFT + A” command and select the Gear option :

Now the tool is up and ready to work! When ready just export your STL!

So this is it! See you next post guys! Or check out one of my other posts like Adding support, dont waste material on your 3dprints!