Custom Gears

Alongside our extensive range of standard catalogue gears Reliance also designs and manufactures bespoke gears to customers’ requirements. Reliance has over 50 years of experience in gearing, ranging from high accuracy, long life applications such as radar and optical payload applications, to very short life highly loaded aerospace applications.

Gear specialists at Reliance are very happy to offer advice on the design strategy for custom gears and can help with datum positioning and dimensioning to achieve the best possible accuracy at the most economical cost. For example, simply utilising the mounting feature of the gear as the datum for the gear cutting operation avoids unnecessary tolerance build ups and interim manufacturing operations.

Reliance’s engineers have a detailed knowledge of the principles of gear tooth generation and the resulting contact conditions. This enables them to work with engineers in other industries to offer advice on the modification of gear teeth to provide bespoke contact conditions that enhance the performance of the gear pair, or to achieve an imposed centre distance within the constraints of the design environment.

Typical market areas are aerospace, space, defence and down-hole instrumentation where performance-critical applications demand a deep understanding of gear geometry. Both external, internal and combination gears can be manufactured using high accuracy hobbing and shaping machines with a module range of between 0.2 to 1.5 module and a diameter range from 2 to 330 mm.

Custom gears can be manufactured from a range of materials such as, but not limited to, stainless steel, aluminium alloy, precipitation hardening steel, phosphor bronze, titanium and other speciality metals, as well as high performance polymers such as PEEK. Reliance also works very closely with accredited and formally approved surface coating and heat treatment specialists to provide most industry standard processes.

During manufacturing all gears are individually inspected for gear quality and size using a dual flank inspection process with maximum accuracies of 3 microns tooth-to-tooth and 5 microns total composite error. For demanding applications gears are inspected for lead, pitch and profile on our Klingelnberg P40 gear measuring machine.

Our expertise also extends to the associated structure in geared assemblies where we can provide design for manufacture advice or a full design from specification service. Typical projects can involve concept design, development testing, prototype manufacture, performance validation testing and production manufacture with final acceptance testing.