Gear Tooth Warpage

Projects & Prints
1

I’ve been trying to print gears for a few projects and have had troubles with warpage on the gear teeth. The gears print nearly perfectly, however the teeth closest to the table that need supports have significant warpage that leads to improper meshing.

This is a second attempt at printing a replacement gear for my RC Car. I thought the black resin might have different printing quality than the clear resin, however both parts came out identical. All of my gear printing attempts have had warpage like this or worse. I suspect It has to do with the supports as the only warped teeth are the ones that start the gear.

This shows the original (bottom left) as well as gears printed in both the black and clear resin. I had manually edited all of the supports in an attempt to make sure every gear tooth had adequate support.

I have written more detail in a few posts on my blog:


Does anyone have suggestions of how to avoid this warpage?

2

I’ve been getting that same issue with casings.
Also with a part that is very similar to your gears (but is not a gear).

Printing (near) horizontally results in bad surfaces.
Printing (near) vertically results in warpage exactly like yours.

Haven’t had the time to give it another try, but i think the solution is to print them almost flat (horizontal) with A LOT of supports. Printing vertically(ish) nearly always results in warping.

3

I found the same thing. Printing gears just means a lot of surface finishing on one side but it’s fairly easy to just lay a piece of sandpaper on the desk and run it back and forwards to take it to a smooth surface.