Jan 4, 2010
Gleason Corporation has introduced CONIFLEX®Plus, a high-speed dry cutting tool system for the manufacture of straight bevel gears. CONIFLEX®Plus is the world’s first peripheral stick blade cutting tool system with positive blade seating, which results in substantial reductions in cutting time coupled with improvements in gear quality and gear rolling characteristics.
Straight bevel gears are an increasingly popular choice for certain applications. Prior to the introduction by Gleason of a 6-axis machining process for straight bevel gears in 2006, there was no modern machinery or process to cut or grind straight bevel gears. The process introduced in 2006 was a wet cutting process, using traditional high speed steel cutting tools.
The new CONIFLEX®Plus system raises the bar by allowing the use of coated carbide cutting tools in a high-speed dry cutting environment. This new process is up to three times faster than its predecessor, avoids the use of cutting fluids, and consumes only 25% of the energy of traditional straight bevel gear cutting.
The geometry of existing straight bevel gear designs will be exactly duplicated using the new CONIFLEX®Plus cutter system. Furthermore the new system provides additional freedoms for strength and noise optimizations due to the free design of profile curvature, dish angle, edge radius and blade point. The PENTAC® stick blades, used in CONIFLEX®Plus cutter heads can be sharpened on existing standard Gleason stick blade sharpening machines, no additional software or fixtures are required.
Gleason Corporation’s mission is to be The Total Gear Solutions Provider™ to its global customer base. Gleason is a world leader in the development, manufacture and sale of gear production machinery and related equipment. The Company’s products are used by customers in automotive, truck, aircraft, agriculture, mining, windpower, construction, power tool and marine industries and by a diverse set of customers serving various industrial equipment markets. Gleason has manufacturing operations in Rochester, New York; Rockford, Illinois; Dayton, Ohio; Plymouth, England; Munich and Ludwigsburg, Germany; Studen, Switzerland; Bangalore; India, and Suzhou, China and has sales and service offices throughout the North and South America, Europe and in the Asia-Pacific region.
More information about Gleason Corporation is available on the World Wide Web at http://www.gleason.com.
