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Creating a Worm Drive using DesignSpark Mechanical

DesignSpark Mechanical is a fantastic free-to-use 3D CAD design software, if you need to brush up on your skills or if you are an entirely new user stuck on how to create a worm drive, this quick tutorial, plucked from Zendesk, is just the thing.

There are plenty more tutorials just like this one that can be found in the DSM Learning area.

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1. Sketch the profile for the screw and the wheel. As an example, we used these:

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2. Convert them into solids with the PULL tool:

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3. For the wheel/worm gear, the following profile is sketched onto a grid placed slightly above the tangent of the cylinder with a larger radius. You may also use the spline tool to add more of a curve.

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4. Use the 'project' tool to align these segments onto the curved surface.

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5. Select this new surface patch and click on the 'move' tool. Drag the move handle to the centre of the grid and tick the 'pattern' box under the tool options.

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Now, drag the rotational handle along the z-axis (blue colour) to replicate the surface patch 50 times along the circumference of the wheel. This will form the teeth of the wheel. You can select a lower count (25/30) to get a less dense teeth pattern (like the model at the top).

6. Using the Pull tool, either drag the teeth pattern outwards or inwards from the centre of the wheel.

In this example, we drag inwards.

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7. Go back to step 3 where we sketched the tooth profile. We use this as a reference to create a shape for the screw thread.

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8. Use the CTRL key and move tool, copy this shape and align to the length cross-section of the cylindrical screw.

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9. Switch to 3D mode and then using the PULL tool, revolve this shape as a left-handed helix along the length of the cylinder. Enter the value of the pitch as the width of a tooth on the wheel.

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10. With the screw and the wheel complete, feel free to assemble them according to your design requirements.

 

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