Design and application of gear cutting method with conical end milling cutter

Aiming at the problem that the existing commonly used gear cutting methods have many limitations when processing gears of different specifications, a new gear cutting method is proposed. First, a tapered end mill is used as a tool to reciprocate in the tooth width direction and alternately feed along the tangent direction of the pitch circle to achieve cutting. Secondly, by adjusting the gear groove depth, tool path direction and indexing angle to change the gear processing modulus, pressure angle and number of teeth, and give out the method of helical gear processing and arc tooth line gear processing. A 5-axis machining center and a general-purpose milling machine were used for actual cutting tests. The research results deviations of the spur gears on the 5-axis machining center are all within 10 μm, which has high accuracy. Compared with conventional gear hobbing, the maximum error of tooth profile on a general milling machine (connected with a special feed synchronization device) is 0.05mm. The proposed gear cutting method can process gears of various specifications only by using a tapered end mill, which can effectively meet the needs of customized small batch production.