Development Of New Profiling Pinion Cutter For Cutting Hardened Face Gear

Machining hardened face gear with high precision is one of the key developments of gear machining technology at present. Because gear shaping process has a particular role in hardened face gear machining means, the development of pinion cutters has become more and more important in gear manufacturing industry. However, the existing hardened face gear shaper cutter, designed in traditional method, can't machine hardened face gear with high precision because of the invincible antinomy between its shaping precision and its proper cutting edge's angles to exert carbide cutting performance. To solve this problem, this paper provides a new configuring method for hardened face gear shaper cutters. The new configured pinion cutter takes convex curved face, instead of conical face of traditional configured pinion cutter, as its each tooth's rake face, and this convex curved rake face can make pinion cutter not only have high shaping precision but also have proper cutting edge's angles.Based on different equations of cylindrical section curve of wavelike rake face, which is composed of all teeth's convex curved face, a uniform expression for spatial cutting edge curve is developed and, in this way, the distributions of new configured cutter's shaping errors and cutting edge's angles are analyzed. A carbide pinion cutter is designed due to the new configuring theory. In order to generate pinion cutter's wavelike rake face, the relevant grinding wheel and cam are designed according to corresponding cylindrical section curve of the wavelike rake face. Due to this paper, a new configured pinion cutter for cutting hardened face gear has been manufactured successfully.