It’s important to get Blender setup for designing in millimeters or you will have issues with scaling etc. Once you have the addon installed go through the following steps in Blender: 1 – Setup Blender For Millimeter If you plan to go beyond simple spur gears you might want to buy the complete package. The free version does spur gears so for this post that’s all you need. First you have to download the Precision Gears addon and install it in Blender. First we will use Blender and Precision Gears to design the spur gear. For my project the spur gear will be attached to a stepper motor which will provide the power to the machine. Design The Spur GearĪ spur gear is a round gear with the teeth on the outside. Well don’t worry, Precision Gears does all the hard work for you as long as you follow a few simple rules which will be explained in this post. The first thing you might notice is the mathematics behind how gears work especially how to get two gears to mesh together correctly. If you are new to gears, you might want to find some basic gear tutorials on the web. This is part of a larger project that will use the spur gear to drive a rack gear. This post has a number of pro tips you won’t find elsewhere… Goalįor this post our goal is to create a “spur” gear that can be attached to a stepper motor. The $8 dollar price tag seems like a great deal considering how much functionality comes in this add-on. Modeling gears from scratch is not easy although you can find tutorials on the subject. Blender is the 3d modeling CAD software I use for all my 3D printed projects. For this effort I purchased an addon called Precision Gears from Maker Tales. This post will focus on how to design and 3D print gears using Blender.

Blender to 3d printer