Make Gears with Radial Vector Generator...

[JLT]

Have been dabbling on and off with building a wooden geared clock, and along the way crafted a software tool to assist in generating radial vectors (ie, gears, escape wheels, ratchet wheels, snail wheels, etc) for the purpose of cutting the parts on the CarveWright / Compucarve. Based on resources found on the Beall Tool website (http://www.bealltool.com/clockforum), included in the tool among other profiles is the ability to generate the grasshopper escapement per Guy D Aydlett's well written paper, along with cycloidal gears using the module method.

Am offering this software tool as freeware (with all its warts) in the event that others might find it useful. The core application is written in VB6, and in order to make it easily extensible, the individual radial profiles are written in VBScript. This also permits scrutiny of the mathematical algorithms used to generate the various profiles. Currently it will export the rendered profiles in the following formats: BMP, Adobe Illustrator, and SVG. In the case of the Adobe Illustrator format, this can be converted into CarveWright / Compucarve Designer files (MPCs).

Simply extract the "Radial Vector Generator v1.2" folder. For further information, please see the readme.txt file in the attached ZIP file.

Note: The software tool is attached to this post as a ZIP file, and has been scanned with Symantec v11.0.6005.562.

2016-01-17 JLT: Updated and attached to post the latest Radial Vector Generator software v1.5a. Virus scanned with Windows Defender.