Gear Clones

August 2019

Melbourne, Australia

After the cumulative mechanical failure of a number of window blind gears over the years, I faced the prospect of having to replace each gear with expensive, defective, proprietary replicas. To sidestep the economical and ethical objections to such an arrangement, I took precise measurements of the failed gear type, generated a model using FreeCAD and used the 3D printers at the Library at the Dock to produce the prototypes. After a number of iterations, I settled on the final model and printed a few dozen gears. A great success!