Hopwood Gear ltd is a gear cutting company in the UK who can manufacture all your gears from start to finish all under one roof.

When choosing gear cutting companies make sure you choose one who has the knowledge and facilities that we have. We are second to none on this front. We have been gear cutting now for nearly 40 years.

Gear cutting is the process of machining gears into shape. There are several different ways to make gears. These include: drawing, forging, extrusion, casting, powder metallurgy, and thread rolling. Gears are not exclusively made of metal and can also be made of plastic or even fibre. The use of gears ranges from small everyday operations to extremely important operations on a grand scale. This can be anything from making your watch tick to raising a draw bridge for a large carrier.

When making a gear it is important that the fit between the gears is proper and that the teeth are of good quality. If this is not done then it will result in inefficient energy transfer and will ultimately wear and break down much quicker. A popular way to build gears is by form cutting. This is done by taking a blank gear and rotating a cutter, with the desired tooth pattern, around its periphery. This ensures that the gear will fit when the operation is finished.

Other operations such as broaching work particularly well for gear cutting teeth on the inside. The downside to this is that it is expensive and different broaches are required to make different sized gears. Therefore it is mostly used in very high production runs. When broaches are not available we can also wire erode the teeth.

There are lots of different types of gear cutters used when creating gears by gear manufacturer. One is a rack shaper. These are straight and move in a direction tangent to the gear, while the gear is fixed. They have six to twelve teeth and eventually have to be moved back to the starting point to begin another cut.

Another is a pinion-shaped gear cutter that is used in a gear shaper machine. It is basically when a cutter that looks similar to a gear cuts a gear blank. The cutter and the blank must have a rotating axis parallel to each other. This process works well for low and high production runs.

Lastly, there is a cutter called a hob. This is like a worm that turns and cuts the gear. The angle must be set up at minus 90 between the hob and the gear blank, but then the lead angle of the hob threads must be accounted for. The hob must make one revolution to create each tooth of the gear. Used very often for all sizes of production runs, but works best for medium to high. After being gear cut the gear can be finished by shaving, burnishing, grinding, honing or lapping.

If there is anything I have left out above about gear cutting and you wish to know then contact us for further information.