The tooth and gap dimension are the same but the number of teeth is different.

If I’ve confused you by swapping sprockets, don’t be. More about that later… Amended sprocket template These lines dissected each tooth in two to provide a centre point to a 13mm circle which is the size of the each tooth. This meant that the diameter of each tooth had to be 13mm.īecause of this I drew some additional lines onto the template. My sprocket had teeth that were 25mm apart with gap of 12mm between. It prints to scale and also lists the critical dimensions and shows the points which need drilling out. This is one of the paper templates I printed. To begin with you’ve got look at the template the gear program produces and to try to understand what’s going on. As such I had a couple of unsuccessful builds that I certainly didn’t want to use as templates. I found my circles weren’t true so the measurements were off (whether this was my printer, the paper quality, the paper stretching with glue, etc, I’m not sure). More critically I found that despite using his gear program correctly, my paper templates were never very accurate. Whether I used a lot or a little amount of glue, I invariably found that the template would tear apart throughout the process, leaving me with no guidelines. Now this is a great theory and I’m guessing it’s worked well for him and thousands of others – but not for me. Matthias instructs us to cut out the template, glue it to a scrap of wood, drill out some holes, trim away the excess with a bandsaw then sand to finish. The gear generator program allows the user to type in their required measurements and from this it produces a paper template. Think of a bicycle, where the pedals meet the chain. Sprockets are similar in appearence to gears but they work in conjunction with a chain rather than another gear. Unfortunately I needed sprockets and these are not part of the free version, but Matthias’s download version does cope with these and is very reasonably priced. You can see it online on his website See the accompanying video here. Matthias is the wood gears guru in my opinion and his program is easy and in part free. I needed to make sprockets as templates for some lost foam casting I had in mind and like a lot of people I came across Matthias Wandel’s excellent Wood Gear Generator program. Wooden Sprockets Cutting Wood Sprockets & Gears Using A Simple Jig How to wire a 4 Pole Illuminated Rocker Switch.

Free wooden gear patterns