Manufacture of face-hobbed straight bevel gears using a six-axis CNC bevel gear cutting machine

Face hobbing is a continuous indexing and double-flank cutting process whose high productivity and precision has made it one of the leading methods for fabricating spiral bevel and hypoid gears. The current method is inappropriate, however, for cutting straight bevel gears (SBGs) because it generates extended epicycloidal flanks. Nonetheless, a mathematical model of a face-hobbed SBG was successfully established in earlier research that enables straight cutting paths to cut straight tooth spaces based on a hypocycloidal straight-line mechanism in which the rolling circle radius equals half the base circle radius. This mathematical model, however, is based on a virtual universal cradle-type bevel gear cutting machine that has not yet been developed. This paper therefore proposes another mathematical model of face-hobbed SBG based on a modern six-axis computer numerical control (CNC) bevel gear cutting machine. The six-axis nonlinear machine settings are derived through conversion from the cradle-type machine settings. Meanwhile, the usage of electric gearbox (EGB) for bevel gear cutting is not revealed because of commercial consideration. Therefore, we also provide a solution to use EGB of Fanuc 16i CNC controller. A cutting experiment validates the proposed mathematical models using our developed six-axis CNC bevel gear cutting machine to cut the face-hobbed SBGs. Finally, a flank topographic correction is made that, according to postcorrection simulated topographic errors, can effectively reduce manufacturing errors. This paper successfully implements a face-hobbing process for manufacturing SBGs on a modern six-axis CNC bevel gear cutting machine.