Forest City Gear offers a variety of engineering services. In addition to our inspection processes, we offer hob and shaper cutter inspection and sharpening. Before hobbing or shaping gear teeth, we review the customer print and check that we have the correct hob or shaper cutter. If a new hob or shaper cutter is needed, we work with our tool vendors and review the design.

If a customer is experiencing quality issues, our first step is to check their gears. Problems on the involute profile of the gear are usually caused by the initial quality of the cutter or improper sharpening and mounting of the tool on the gear machine. Problems in the lead are generally created by poor blank quality or deficient tooling not locating on the proper datum. Excessive runout can often be traced back to improperly machined locating data or poorly made tooling.

If one of the issues discovered points to a tooling issue, that is our next step. If the trueing hubs or rings are running true, then we’ll check the sharpening to see whether it is a sharpening error: if so, we also provide hob and shaper cutter sharpening.

Our consultation services have helped customers resolve gear and noise issues for over 60 years. We provide quotes for analytical gear inspection on our CNC inspection machines. Once the testing is complete, we review the data and suggest causes for errors and make recommendations on how to correct these deficiencies.

When processing parts, we let customers know when we see changes they can make to help improve the quality of their gears and to reduce their costs. All jobs are reviewed before processing, and at that time we offer any improvements or cost reductions that we find.

Forest City Gear realizes that the accuracy of a gear’s profile is determined by the quality of the hob being used to generate the teeth. Our modern hob-sharpening equipment allows us to re-sharpen hobs consistent with Class AA tolerances.

Shaper cutter sharpening is done to the same exacting tolerances to guarantee the highest gear quality.