How to generate gears in sketchup with circle, offset & rotate tools

In this sketchup video tutorial, Justin Geis provides some useful sketchup tips for generating gears with the use of circle, offset and rotate tools inside sketchup. You don?t have to use any sketchup extension for this purpose.

Some useful tips :-

While going to produce geometry like this, initially you have to focus on the number of segments in your circles. SketchUp does not have the ability to draw ?pure? curves. As an alternative, the curves are developed with a set of individual segments, which are arranged by providing a number with the circle tool turned on. The number of teeth in your gear can be modified by fixing the number of segments in your circle.

As for instance, let?s draw 2 circles maintaining the similar radius, one with 24 sides, and one with 36 sides.

If the offset tool is applied to generate a slightly larger circle and draw in some teeth, it is possible to employ the rotate tool to copy the teeth around the radius. Here, the circle having more segments contain more teeth.

As soon as the circle is drawn, draw a slightly larger circle by applying offset tool. After that, draw lines to the equivalent segment points to start a tooth. The scale tool can be applied to curtail this line (hold the control key for constant scaling). It is the perfect time to choose your circle, right click and choose make center. This will arrange a control point at the center of your circle that should be applied to copy your tooth in rotate mode.

As soon as you?ve detailed out one tool, the rotate tool can be used in copy mode to produce the rest of your teeth. You may require to get into and remove some left over geometry.

Now, go in and detail out the remaining gear. While accomplishing this, it?s vital to recognize the math of how you?re parting your gear up.

If it is required to draw 6 holes in your gear, just split the number of degrees in a circle (360) with the number of holes required by you for creation. After that, it is possible to draw your hole as per your choice, then generate copies along the number of degrees you worked out.

After completing this, just remove your leftover geometry and with the use of the push/pull tool extrude your gear into 3d.

How to generate gears in sketchup with circle, offset & rotate tools