Method for High Accuracy Cutting Blade Inspection

Printed with permission of the copyright holder, the American Gear Manufacturers Association, 1001 N. Fairfax Street, Fifth Floor, Alexandria, VA 22314-1587. Statements presented in this paper are those of the author(s) and may not represent the position or opinion of the American Gear Manufacturers Association. Introduction Inspection of the cutting blades is an important step in the bevel gear manufacture. The proper blade geometry ensures that the desired gear tooth form can be achieved. The accuracy of the process can be compromised when the blade profile consists of several small sections such as protuberance, main profile, top relief and edge radius. Another common obstacle — are outliers which can be caused by dust particles, surface roughness and also floor vibrations during the data acquisition. This paper proposes the methods to improve the robustness of the inspection process in such cases. The authors propose a procedure for using larger (combined) portions of the blades to evaluate the properties of the small features. This method was inspired by the standard AGMA/ANSI ISO 13281-B14 for the evaluation of tooth profiles on cylindrical gears. An example of the application could be the assessment of the pressure angle and blade distance in case when the blades have large toprem and flankrem sections (short cutting/ clearance edge portion). In cases where the measured data contains outliers, the filtering is proposed using the random sample consensus (RANSAC) procedure. The authors show the effectiveness of the procedure using the actual measurement data. Finally, the proposed methods were Figure 1 Face cutter head (Face Milling) with stick blades (Ref. 2).