A disk tool cutting method for bevel gear manufacture on a five-axis machine

Two main popular cutting methods for bevel gear mass production, face milling and face hobbing, both require dedicated tools and machines available from only a few machine tool companies, which makes production more costly. This paper thus proposes a cheaper, more flexible alternative for producing small or medium batches of large bevel gears, a disk tool cutting method using a five-axis machine. In this method, the machine coordinates are derived based on tooth surfaces. The target’s topographic points of tooth surface are applied to construct a fitted surface which is then used to further refine the cutter-contact points to improve the precision of the gear produced. At the same time, mathematical models are established for both the tool and the machine. A coordinate transformation matrix is then generated by aligning the coordinate system of the tool’s reference point with each of the work gear cutter-contact points. Because different machines employ identical transformation matrices for producing the same workpiece, the machine’s five-axis coordinates can be derived using inverse kinematics. These coordinates are the resource to generate the NC machining data that allows NC verification software to perform cutting simulations. The simulation results verify the correctness of the mathematical models.