Ball chain gears Thingiverse02: 00 16/03/2010, John Baichtal, 3D printing, MAKE: Blog

Ball chain gears Thingiverse02: 00 16/03/2010, John Baichtal, 3D printing, MAKE: Blog



Vik's RepRap blog created these balls to print the chain of gears, and the DST up and lots of Thingiverse.

I finally managed to print tiny ball chain gear working with 3.3 mm and 3.5 mm diameter ball chain and still fit in the axis of the output NEMA17 5mm. The trick is to print the gearbox in two pieces.

As you can see in the picture, you print two sections of 4 mm thickness of the arts and put them into the shaft with a washer M5 in the middle. Make sure the teeth are aligned in both wheels. This gives a channel to direct the ball of string through the center of the arts, and grips the sides of the ball properly. As the gears of age, will also grinding balls its too far through the PLA, although I must admit that my experience with the Z axis ball gear chain suggests that this is not a major problem.

The gears are designed to be "spiky", but the vaguearities of printing and the process of representation of the spikes of Lop and accidentally leave enough to produce an art that works!
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