Abstract
The high productivity of gear skiving has caused the process to attract a lot of attention in recent years and taper shaped skiving cutters are generally used in current gear skiving. A cutter axis in gear skiving is inclined to a gear axis and a taper shaped skiving cutter could cause tooth profile deviations of skived gears after re-sharpening of tool faces. Adjusting cutter position and/or re-profiling of cutter flanks are applied to enable tooth profile deviations of skived gears to remain within acceptable ranges when the adjustment is necessary. Adjusting cutter position is preferred to re-profiling of cutter flanks due to desire for low production cost. However, the universality of the current methods of calculating cutter positions is still not confirmed. The present study explains that the current methods for obtaining cutter positions could require individual calculating formulas according to cutter specifications for each particular gear. A universal method which avoids such complexity of making various formulas could contribute to permit gear skiving to become more useful in the gear machining field. Then such a desirable method is proposed and the reasonability of the method is confirmed by experiments. In addition, this study discusses the existence of scope in which the method can be applied and a method for checking collisions between cutter flanks and gear tooth flanks being cut after adjustment of cutter position.
