Adam Savage's One Day Builds: Machining a Gear!

Adam embarks on a build he's long wanted to make: a supersized flywheel powered toy car that can move with tremendous energy. The first step: machining a scaled-up version of one of the gears in the toy's gear train. Machining a working gear with a specific number of teeth and gear pitch is something Adam has never done before, so it's going to be a fun machining exercise!

Shot by Adam Savage and edited by Josh Self
Music by Jinglepunks

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#adamsavage #onedaybuilds #machining

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[Clickspring]

Beautiful work mate, prettier than my first pinion! Look forward to watching this build :)

[briancox]

Some tips to make your next experience better:
1) it's called a tail stock on the lathe, it's called a footstock on the mill. This isn't about gatekeeping, knowing the proper terms makes finding spare parts easier
2) let the stock cool between your last roughing cut and the finish cut. Measure and adjust the DRO accordingly. Makes hitting the number easier.
3) use a four jaw independent chuck on your dividing head to dial in the part to tenths on the mill.
4) you don't have to go full depth in one pass on the gear cutter. Take two or three passes to reduce chatter, improve finish, and prolong cutter life.
5) look up the surface speed for the material you are cutting and the chip load per tooth for the cutter. Use those to calculate RPM and then feed rate. This also improves dimensional accurate, surface finish, and cutter life. And no hammering of death noises when cutting.

[mikestone]

A long-term design point: using brass or bronze against iron/steel is a good choice because it prevents surface galling. The cost is that most of the wear happens on the gear made of the softer material. Typical practice is to spread that wear out across as many teeth as possible, so we usually make pinions of steel and use brass/bronze/plastic for the larger wheels.

For the project you're doing now, it hardly matters. You might see the effects of wear on the brass gears if you use the toy every day for the next ten years. The idea becomes more important if you make gear trains that run continuously, or carry a lot of force, and is one of those bits of knowledge you pick up as you spend time working with gears.

[DareDevilDave]

Don’t leave us waiting too long! We want to see the whole build!

[leovandijk]

Expert gear engineer here, love your explanation of pressure angle etc. It is as complex as you explain actually.
You should look into gear hobbing, which actually mills different teeth shapes (tooth counts) on gears, using the same tool. Nice video 👌

[chuckkincaid]

I could watch Adam build anything and be entertained

[simonhoney]

Y'know this description of gears at the start.. like you're right I don't need to know it, I'm immediately forgetting it, but the depth of human understanding and capability about any given subject always blows my mind. How far and how perfectly a person can understand something to keep making it better. Beautiful.

[Frequincy]

The one day builds where Adam does something for the first time are the best one day builds imho

[tAbes]

Hey Adam, I'm a phd student whose primary research area is on gear geometry and applications. I just wanted to say it was cool watching you learn a bit about the subject and make a couple of spur gears in this video!

[JasonOlshefsky]

I always thought it would be neat to have "human-powered drag races" where people would make vehicles with flywheels or springs or super-capacitors/generators. Maybe 30 seconds to add energy from zero, and classes based on mechanical or electrical.

[SinisterMD]

Adam, this is fantastic and always wonderful to watch someone machine something complex like this. If you're curious about a full size "flywheel" car you might be interested in what Porsche (and to some extent Williams F1) did with a mounted flywheel. It was mag-lev and used magnetic induction to spin so as to reduce friction loss. Very cool tech on what it a very old idea.

[steveclarke]

Adam, thank you for showing people the skill needed to be an engineering machinist; in today's modern world of CinC tools, seeing someone having to work the way my grandfather, father and brother learnt to do their profession is satisfyingly interesting.

[sincladp]

I love the introduction of education here. I know nothing of this type of machining or even mathematics, but I love to learn. Keep those things coming Adam, even if your only have marginalized knowledge of them, because any experience helps people with none.

[kudasauce]

Everything about this video was top notch. Perfect amount of intro story time, flair of goofy transitions, time lapse commentary. Everything!

[ToTheGAMES]

I love the color of bronze and I love the strings it makes while cutting!

[leonardodalongisland]

LOVE how you take the time to break things down and explain them-including your thinking aloud-which we all know is often so helpful. And the car-repair analogy was brilliant and spot on!

[Woodtick]

Made my first and only gear 30 yrs ago. I got to relive that experience today. Thank you!

[cemx]

At 7:28 Adam mentions cutting gears and watching the ClickSpring YouTube channel. Great and beautiful stuff there. Another very good machinist's channel is Keith Rucker's Vintage Machinery channel. He is a very good teacher.

[markireson]

'I dog-eared the page. I've been here before.' Is an almost cinematicly beautiful point of discovery. There were people here before.... and it was us. They've left us a message. This'll make me smile for hours.