Topic: Great gear plugin for Sketchup!
This is a totally rocking' sketch up plugin to create involute, beveled, helix, and/or any combination of the aforementioned types of gears.
Download link below...
The best one I have found out there. It's not perfect, and you can't do worm gears with it. but worm gears aren't too bad to model if you have the helix plugin for SketchUp.
Now I use to hate sketch up, and there are lots of annoying things about the program, not really intended by design for parts modeling. However, with the right set of plug-ins, and making sure to model in meters and then down scale into mm after you are done modeling (avoids some very frustrating SketchUp centric modeling bugs) this is actually one of the best cad programs out there given the cost;)
Sure i'd love to run Solidworks! But who has a few grand sitting around to toss at modeling software. Not many.
Minature complex gear systems is one of the big reasons I love my 3d printer. But until I found this they took a bit of time to model. This greatly increases my modeling workflow.
It's a .rb file. So just drop the bad boy into your SketchUp plugins folder, and it will appear under the plugins menu.
I found this over originally on the SketchUcation forum. Credits to Mark Jason Grundman for writing it. I simply fixed a bug that wouldn't allow universal unit compatibility.
If any of you serious coders (unlike me) wanted to add a worm gear option to this bad boy, that would be amazing. Still a great plug-in and thought I should share.
