Precision Gears after the casting
So I made my mold and cast some gears......
This is what happened - I did the deed and made some gears.
The gears actually turned out pretty good, but my resin is way to flexible and the gears, while nice, are to flexible to put into service.
Now I have found the proper resin to make gears and new instructions to make the mold so I'm going to give it another shot....
So did you ever get the gears to work? and if so what type of epoxy did you use?
ReplyDeleteSo here's what happened...the resin I used for that cast was too flexible and not real useful. I did learn to make the gears in the free program called Inkscape and was able to cut scribe them onto plastic and cut them out, but they are very thin and not useful for what I want. However, I purchased a laser cutter, which isn't here yet and that will allow me to cut custom gears from a stronger material and cast them with a Shore D polymer, such as IE-3075. All of that really turns out not to matter however since my tinfoil trick in my other post works awesome on repairs and even better is that finding small replacement gears is simple and you get a bag full of various gears for a couple dollars on ebay. It turns out that these grab bag of small robot gears are the same gears used is most trains. In fact, there are only a couple different size mounting holes for gears and you'll get plenty of gears of all kinds to repair pretty much anything you ever need. But, in the case of a super rare European Steam Engine made in the 1970's with a custom gear, nothing has beaten the tinfoil cladding.
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