The Pros & Cons of Plastic Gear Design  

The AGMA quality standard governs both plastic and steel gears. Plastic gears provide a number of distinct benefits over their metal counterparts. These benefits make them more enticing in toda...

Repairing Gears 

Sometimes, creating a new gear simply isn’t an option. Replacement is costly, and worse, it can often take weeks to produce a new gear and ship it to a customer. Repairing your gears, howeve...

What is Gear Chamfering?  

If you’ve spent any time researching parts fabrication, chances are good you’ve come across the term “gear chamfering.” This is a step in the finishing process that any professional pulley and ...

Women in Manufacturing

As women in the workforce moved from novel to commonplace to expected throughout the 20th century, their changing roles became the focus of many news articles, documentaries, and blog posts. ...

Choosing the Best Materials For Your Gears

When choosing the best alloy steel for gears, there’s a lot to consider. Heavy-duty applications are no place for guesswork, which means understanding exactly what you need from your gears and wha...

The Pros & Cons of Underdrive Pulleys

When you think of underdrive pulleys, you might think of muscle cars and hot rods. Underdrive pulleys have been used in vehicles since the 1950s and were even used on the Ford Mustang. Today,...

Accounting for Belt & Pulley Inertia

Physics and Mechanics: How to Account for Belt and Pulley Inertia in System Design  Newton's first law of motion states that if an object is at rest or moving at a constant speed in a straight l...

HTD Timing Belts and Curvilinear Tooth Profiles

From flat belts to ribbed belts, curvilinear belts to trapezoidal belts, there are many different types of timing belts! All the different timing belts are like a "family", with each of the differ...

Rack and Pinion Drives: Overview

You might see rack and pinion technology on a rack railway, where the rotation of a pinion mounted on a train car engages a rack to get the train up a steep mountain. Rack and pinion technology...