Design engineers face continuous pressure to enhance product performance while driving down costs. For many devices, converting metal components to plastic is an effective way of achieving both goals.

The use of plastic gears is limited, largely because it takes special expertise to design them properly. Too, many engineers deal with gears so infrequently, that the seemingly complex discipline ...

This article was updated March 6, 2023. It was originally published Aug. 1, 2001. Gears—even plastic ones—need to be lubricated if engineers are going to coax the best performance out of them. In the ...

Makers, engineers and hobbyists who would like to automatically manufacture a variety of different size plastic gears you might be interested in a unique machine built using a little Arduino hardware, ...

It’s very likely that a majority of readers will have had a gear fail in a piece of equipment, causing it to be unrepairable. This is a problem particularly with plastic gears, which shed teeth faster ...