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Printing gears

A project log for Crazy Clock

A replacement controller for Lavet stepper clock movements

nick-sayerNick Sayer 12/15/2021 at 18:340 Comments

After a couple of iterations, I believe I have a pair of gears designed that work.

Printing these is fairly difficult. As I noted originally, there's no way an FDM printer would be able to get these right. With SLA, the issue becomes how you support them. You can't tilt the gears at all, because doing so will result in the need to support the tips of the gears on one side. The problem with that is that the gear points are going to be smaller than the touchpoints. This means we have to print the gears flat. We could print them flat on the build plate with no raft at all, but then removing them without damaging the teeth is problematic. I've printed a few with carefully placed supports, and that works, but even removing supports that are kept behind the inner plane of the gearing, it's still possible to break the teeth off if you're not extremely careful.

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