Abstract
Conventional measurement of cylindrical gears is carried out only on working tooth flanks based on the principle of the generating method, and tooth profiles and pitch deviations are separately measured. Those measuring procedures have essentially disadvantage in measuring time due to additional movement for tooth indexing. New measuring strategy proposed here has the advantage to overcome such long-time consuming measurement because the measurement strategy is to scan whole circumference of a cylindrical gear outline including working flanks, tooth tip, root and bottom profiles without detaching the stylus tip from the gear surface. It can be done with two axis movement: the first axis is stylus movement in radial direction and the second axis is the rotational motion of the gear measured. The synchronized movement control of both axes is the key to achieve the constant line speed scanning in whole measurement. A standard cylindrical gear was measured using the developed GMM and the whole shape of the gear outline was successfully obtained with the scanning speed of 5mm/s. The tip edge is one of the challenging shapes to be measured, but it was also obtained in good accuracy by adjusting the nominal data to be used. The proposed method has the great advantage because the measured whole data have information of tooth profiles of both flanks of all teeth, tip diameter, the edge shapes of tooth tips, root and bottom profiles of all teeth, as well as pitch deviations.
