Transcription
Welcome to this special tutorial, which will teach you how to create complex gear assemblies. Autodesk Fusion makes it incredibly easy to assemble all sorts of gear assemblies, including miter gears, gear and gear racks, ratchet assemblies, and worm gear assemblies. In this tutorial, we will focus on one assembly, along with specifying the correct motion, creating a motion link, and then a motion study. Stay tuned to the end to see how you can learn the other types of gears. Welcome to the Learn It Channel. Let's make a gear assembly. So, just as a quick preview, Fusion is incredibly powerful. We can create some amazing types of gear assemblies here. And this is what it's all about. That's a worm gear and worm. We've got this ratchet design as well. This is great gear and gear rack. Very cool. For all your assembly needs, Fusion has got you covered. We've got different types of angled gears here, these mitered gears, 120° and 45°. We've also got this 90° gear assembly. So, you might think this is incredibly complex, but with the Learn It Channel, we hope to teach you how to do this very easily. So, let's get right into it.
So, the first thing we're going to do is create a new design, and we're going to save this as our miter gear assembly 90°. So, the first thing we need to do is go to insert and insert a McMaster-Carr component. So, in professional design, we don't always have to create every single gear from scratch. However, if you'd like to see the math behind it and creating all of this, how to figure that out, please comment in the comment section below. However, most professionals will go into something like McMaster-Carr, find the gear that they'd like, which has all the necessary info in order to create the gear assembly. And that's what we're going to do right now. So, just go to the search menu and we're going to type in gears. And there it is. Let's pick gears. And you can see there's a host of different options. Let's go to gears and gear racks. And we're going to create a metal miter gear. So, let's click on that.
Now, this is very important. As soon as we click on any of these types of gears, we need to look for a sentence that talks about how to make these mesh correctly. So, here it is: "For two gears to mesh correctly, they must have the same pressure angle, shaft angle, pitch module, and number of teeth." So, please note that pitch is for imperial gears, and module is used for metric gears. So, let's move on down here. We're going to create an assembly with metric gears. Usually, there's a lot more options with metric gears, and they're very easy to figure out. So, here we have all sorts of different shaft angles. We've got 45°, 60°, 120°, and 90°. And this is what we want to work with. Now, the one dimension that we're going to need to memorize is the mounting distance. So, let's memorize that with whatever we pick. I'm just going to go and pick something like this, a module of two. This looks all great, but the mounting distance is 50 mm. Now, if we click on the part number and then go to product detail, a host of other information shows up. We've got a nice ISO view of the part, but we've got this drawing as well. And as we expand that, you can see that it shows clearly the mounting distance. In this case, it's 50 mm to the back of the gear or the face that's opposite of the teeth. So, 50 mm. Let's remember that. Now we can just shrink that and go back to our downloads. So, usually it shows SolidWorks, but make sure to pick 3D Step. And let's again memorize the 50 mm that we need to. Let's go download, and there we have our first part. Let's go. Okay.
Now, before we proceed, one of the easiest things to do is to create a path that these will actually follow. And that's what we'll do right now. Let's just go back in time and I'm going to create a sketch on the YZ plane. And let's just create a simple line. And this is going to go up 50 mm. And then we can go over 50 mm. And I'm in imperial mode right now, but I can still specify 50 mm. And there is the path that we're going to follow. So, let's go finish sketch. This is looking great. Now, in order to easily join these together, I like to create a pipe and just follow this path. Just like that. Let's go. Okay.
Now, in our timeline, let's go back to our part. And there is our metal miter gear. So, here simply all we have to do is join from this back face to the start of that pipe. Now, we can flip this. And there we have it. There's our first gear in place. Let's go. Okay. Now we can right-click, copy, and then right-click, paste new. Make sure to go paste new. In this instance, I can just drag this gear off to the side. Go. Okay. And now let's join this. Again, I'm going to select the face and then the center point, and then pick the center point of that pipe right there. And we can flip it. And there we have it. So, these two gears are in the proper place right now. Let's go. Okay. And we can always hide that pipe body. This is in our top-level component right now. But there we have it. We've got that original sketch and we've got the body that we can hide.
Now, we can notice something that these two gears are hitting each other right now. The teeth are interfering with one another. So, we need to rotate this a little bit. What I like to do is to go to relationships, go to joints, and rename these so that I can easily identify them later. And I'm going to do that right now. Just single click. Click again, and I'm going to rename this gear one to pipe bottom. And I'll rename rigid two, gear two to pipe side. Now that I've got both of those, you can see that our joints are rigid right now. So, I need to change that. Right-click, edit joint, and let's go to motion and instead of rigid, select revolute. And this should default to the Z-axis. If it's anything else, you can see that our direction is not correct. So, let's make sure to pick Z-axis, nothing else, and go. Okay. Let's do that for the other joint as well. Now, you can see that they're still intersecting one another, but we can revolve this with our mouse. Just single click and you can move those. As soon as you do, you'll see that this position capture tool shows up at the right. Just go revert to set it back to its original position.
So, the next thing we need to do is adjust one of these so that it is moved over by half of a tooth into the correct position. Well, again, how many teeth do we have here? We could count them. Yes. But what I like to do is just copy the number of our part. Go back to McMaster. Search for it. If we go to product detail, this should show us how many teeth we have. 30 teeth. Let's go close. Now, here's the formula that we need to remember. I'm going to go to gear two joint edit, and we're going to rotate this. I like to just use the wheel right here. Rotate it in a positive direction. And I'm going to do an open bracket 360° divided by the number of teeth, which is 30. Close bracket divided by two. And that is our formula. So, you can see now it's perfectly spaced and perfectly mating with each other. Now, we can still move this, but there's no link right now. So, let's create a motion link between the two of them. Up here in assemble, we're going to create a motion link. And we just pick our two joints, one and two. Now, that automatically says as the first joint rotates 360°, the second joint will also rotate 360°. But, as you can see, they're going in opposite directions. So, I need to reverse this. And now the joints are going in the correct direction. So, that's perfect. Let's go. Okay.
Now I'm just going to apply some color to this. I'm going to press A. And under my favorites, I have matte green here. You can also search for it. Just type in green or whatever else you want to call it. And I'm going to go back to my favorites and just make one green and one red. Now, just before we go to our motion study, I wanted to mention that all the rest of the types of gears and their assemblies can be found for our paid members on Patreon. There are a ton of other types of tutorials that you can explore, including behind-the-scenes raw tutorials. There's practice drawings, there's all sorts of goodies. Also, if we're missing a gear assembly that you would like to see us produce, well, then you can comment that in the comment section below or on our Patreon page.
So, let's get to the last aspect of this, which is our motion study. Let's go to assemble and we can create a motion study. So, here we need to make sure that we've reverted the position and we need to select joints to animate. Now, remember we've linked two joints together. So, we don't actually need to pick two joints. We just need to pick one or the other. I'd like to pick the main joint right there. And you can see it's starting off at 0°. So, just to explain the motion study, the X-axis is time, and we've got 100 frames. You can see as I hover the mouse over that, we've got all these different points. We've got 52 points. These are frames, and we can go up to 100 frames for our motion study. Now, the Y direction in this case refers to our change in degrees. So, if I go to the very end here, it should say step of 100. If it doesn't, it might say step of 99, but easily we can change that to 100. But the amount of angle we want to change this to a full rotation, which is 360°. Press enter. That locks it in. Let's bring our speed down and go to infinite loop. And then hit play. As we do so, this is just going to keep on spinning into infinity. So, if you've benefited from this tutorial, please smash that like button. If you love us, please consider subscribing. And hope you check out our Patreon link in the description below to see how you can make those other gear assemblies.