Help needed making gear designs

hello my name is Roy Sherrill
i just bought a Cubify Cube 3d printer and am needing assistance with designing gears in 3d and exporting them into an STL file. the basic design with gears and spokes is being done in http://woodgears.ca/gear_cutting/template.html where i am exporting the gear shape into a JPF image.

i am new to rhino but not to 3d modeling. i need learn how to inport the jpg fine. do a border search to extract the gears shape. then extrude it out to the height i need. i then need to do an insert to thin the thickness of the spokes so i can wrap wire around the.

once i can get the gear from a jpg into a 3d stl file i would then be able to do further modifications. its just the initial stage i need assistance with.

or if you know of an easier way of designing gears in rhino that include the proper teeth angles and meshes i would be grateful.

Roy myrddinstarhawk@gmail.com

It’s a bit of a kludge to have something that is generating a vector object (the gear profile) but then have to go through having it rasterized into a jpeg and then try to re-vectorize it for cutting…

I would try Thomas Anagnostou’s GearGen plug-in for Rhino to generate the gears directly in Rhino, there are also other programs around that can generate vector gear files…

–Mitch

Edit: Oh, and looks like their paid version ($26) can generate a DXF which you can import into Rhino and use.