Pinion Gears
GENTLEMEN,
I was just on ebay, and I saw an auction for some 5B pinion gears from Germany, which I am sure you have all seen. Upon close inspection of the photo of these gears, each appears to have a different profile gear tooth. I had never seen this before. For example, if you were to use a 15 tooth rather than the stock 17 tooth, there would be consideral slop between the teeth of the two gears. However, the 15 tooth gear pictured has teeth that are considerably different from the 17 tooth. The teeth are "fatter" which would compensate for the normally resulting excessive backlash between the two gears when a smaller pinion is used. The larger the number of teeth per individual gear, the smaller the teeth are machined to compensate for the increase or lack of distance between the gears. Now I can see this solving the gear meshing question. This is is how HPI has to be doing it also. I had never thought , or have come to experience, gears of different tooth profiles use to compensate for correct meshing. But as I sat here and tried to understand this , I forgot one of the basic gearing principles of all and that is that when changing the ratios between two gears, their shafts have to be readjusted only if the tooth profiles between the two meshing gears remain the same and the number of teeth on only one of the two gears involved is altered. Although overlooked by myself and possibly others, this is the only concievable way that this could work. I knew I was missing something. I had never taken a close look at the gears offered on ebay. The photos I've seen of those offered by HPI don't lend themselves to the same "straight on view" as those offered on ebay.
My thought now turns to this. Although I can understand how the gears can be properly meshing, how effective are these gears? The whole effectiveness in a gearing change is to change the leverage ratio from the pivoting center of each gear to the distance outward where the two gears actually mesh. Keeping teeth of the same size and going with less of them, a 17 tooth pinion down to a 15 tooth pinion, makes the diameter of the 15 tooth pinion physically smaller than that of the 17 tooth pinion. This changes the leverage between the center of the pinion gear outwards to where it meshes with the spur gear. However, using larger teeth on the 15 tooth pinion in order to compensate for backlash really does not alter its diameter. It cannot, or the two gears would not mesh because both shafts (pinion and spur gear) are in fixed locations. Also, going with an 18 tooth pinion means that because there is no adjustment between the spur and pinion gear shafts,the teeth of the pinion would have to be made smaller, which the photos indicate, and would mesh with the spur gear at the outer most area of its teeth, thus increasing the leverage ratio of the pinion gear to that of the spur gear. Technically, this provides lower gearing whereas a pinion with more teeth should provide higher gearing. All said and done, I still believe that, under the circumstances, the only way to achieve realistic gearing change results is to change the pinion and spur gears as a matched set.
Steve Z