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3D Printing really large gears

A project log for Creating an Autonomous Dinghy with ArduRover

ArduRover is a powerful land vehicle controller software that I intend to use for a DIY 42' boat autopilot.

timo-birnscheinTimo Birnschein 11/06/2019 at 02:410 Comments

I am in the experimentation stage. I have all the hardware together and just want to see this go.

My current plan of record is the implementation of everything on my Dinghy instead of an RC boat. All I need is a very large servo motor (old windscreen wiper motor with an off the shelve H-bridge, a 10 turn potentiometer and an old disassembled servo as a controller) and some very large gears that I can mount to my existing steering wheel. This will also allow me to remove the servo from the steering wheel and go back to manual if I have to.

I started by designing the gears, laser cutting them in under a minute and testing the prototype on the steering wheel. After I was reasonably certain this all would fit together nicely, I sliced the large gear into four pieces and started printing.

My first gear had 90 teeth and wasn't big enough to fit with the servo gear. I would have needed to cut a hole into my console which I really wanted to avoid due to the prototypcal nature of the project. So I made a bigger one with 120 teeth:

This one can be mounted up higher than the other one. Here a comparison:

This would be the largest single part I ever printed (fully assembled).... so I went for it with a pretty empty filament spool.

Part one done:

Part two done!

Part three and four will follow the next couple days. This already looks quite amazing and the teeth are super strong. I print this in PETG with 33% infill and 3.5 perimeters (alternating three and four perimeters for better strength and better infill to perimeter adhesion).

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