Hi, I'm new to this forum and to cnc and I'm just in the final throws of scratch building a small but sturdy 4 axis cnc miller. One of my main interests is restoring antique watches and small clocks and one of the uses I want to put my machine to is cutting new wheels and pinions for these. As it is extremely expensive to buy commercial cutters for every wheel or pinion size and, for most of the wheels and pinions used in antique watches, commercial cutters of the right size don't exist, I would like to find a way to cut these gears by generating the shape. What I envisage is using something like a small slitting saw, of less than the tooth space thickness, in the Z-axis spindle, having the blank in the A-axis rotary parallel to the X-axis and moving the X, Y and Z axes in harmony to generate the wheel tooth form (which is cycloidal [church window shaped] for the wheels and semicircular topped with radial sides for the pinions). I have searched as well as I can on the 'net and in the literature I have access to but can find nothing even remotely relevant. Can anyone help or give me a lead to literature which may be relevant please?
I have the demo version of Mach3 and access to Bobcad and Rhino at the moment. Many thanks.