[feature request] Migrating FCgear and the future FCgearbox to assembly4

[kcleung]

Given the development of the assembly4 addon, which adds assembly support to FreeCAD in a low cost way, it will make sense to migrate FCgear and the future FCgearbox to use assembly4.

I guess Assembly4 will also facilitate our implemetation of FCgearbox.

Is it a good time to make a fork, where FCgear and FCgearbox will be implemented as assembly?

This fork will depend on Assembly4.

[looooo]

I am not sure if asm4 is the way to proceed but if you think so, feel free to share your thought on how to do it. I don't have much time for such things right now.

[stefan123t]

Here is a step by step video from MindScraper detailling the steps to construct a gearbox usign FCGear and Assembly 4.

• It shows how to parametrize the cog wheels
• as well as the shafts added to the gears
• and then takes the critical step of constructing the diametral pitch circle
• then assembly4 is used to describe the layout of the pieces and their dependencies
• it even creates the gearbox side walls with bearings (maybe add some slack)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zYXXfDFg6LY

I think the previous video did not show the calculation to turn the second wheel for the angle of 1/2 teeth (180/teeth) to make them align with interlocking teeth. This is shown in part 2/6 of Evgeniy Ivanov tutorial using Involute Gear (not FCGear sic) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nMhDR3_oeEc

Another honorable mention is the following two videos from Jacques Favre showing how to construct it with FCGear and assembly 4 workbench and in the second part even animate it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-4qlmS25Mk8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eLTrfCl2OG4

@kcleung how would you implement such an FCgearbox plugin / workbench making use of both FCGear and Assembly 4 and generating a set of gears and the matching constraints ?

Also see #33 for a possible entry form used in geargenerator.com to input the list of gear wheels and the resulting constraints.

[jacprog]

Hi thanks for including me here I made this clock: https://forum.freecadweb.org/viewtopic.php?f=24&t=55567 7 pair of gears in XY plan in 6 Z plans, not sure any assembly could help I think the gear workbench is great as is