3D printing cog gears

 

 With a missing cog on the mangler, I decide that I'd try and make one on my 3D printers. A quick bit of research and I ruled out using resin as it just doesn't perform as well as FDM printed plastics. So then on to finding some tougher plastics for my FDM printers as I use mainly cheap as PLA for my models. I quickly found a bunch of videos on guys making gears from Polymaker, Polylite and Poly Max PLA. And my local supplier I get PLA from happened to have some. It was a lot more expensive than the usual cheap stuff I use for model making, but I need to strong enough to (fingers crossed) survive as a large 14 cm gear cog. I found this web site online to generate the gear STL files, which worked out way better than I imagined it would - STLGears.com | The Free STL Gear Designer

Did a tiny first print to get the settings for the new PLA and then a larger print only 3mm thick at full size and the result was awesome. Using the Poly Lite PLA Pro the first print came out ok (needs a bit of tweaking in the printing settings) but fit the existing cog almost perfectly when doing a free hand rotation.

I'm sure it will need more work once I get it put together on the full mangle. Worst case is I will have a nice template to give a fabricator to make once from stell for me. But I'm hopefully that a 3d printed one will be good enough for the pressure I'll be putting thought the mangle.