The manufacture of shaper cutters for involute gear or special form parts has historically been performed on vintage shaper cutter grinding machines, using dry grinding techniques. The cutter teeth are generated with a wheel having the basic rack profile of the cutter, which is conjugate to the gear to be shaped. The aluminum oxide grinding wheels for grinding the cutter teeth are manually profiled using a 10X template, a mechanical dressing system and single point diamonds. The cutters are ground one space at a time, and the cutter is indexed by a large mechanical index plate. While this grinding method has limitations for productivity and cutter quality, the method has served the gear industry for over 40 years.
Gleason Cutting Tools Corporation (GCTC) has modernized this basic generating principle through the development of a modern shaper cutter grinding machine produced by Gleason-Hurth in Munich, Germany. It employs a CNC dressing system capable of dressing CBN or SG wheels to exact required cutter generating rack geometry with a rotary diamond dressing wheel. The achieved quality for cutter tooth profile, index accuracy and runout can be maintained consistently to within class AA, A, or B cutter quality grades. (DIN or AGMA).
Gleason offers a complete range of shaper cutters, including disk-type, Wafer®, deep counterbore-type, and shank-type cutters. Shaper cutters are designed to customer specifications or to a standard, in a large variety of high performance PM high speed steel and carbide, and with a broad range of modern tool coatings. Shaper cutter tooth flanks are ground in accordance with Gleason's high-precision Isoform® process. Tool parameters may range from module 0.5 - 12mm, outside diameter 12-250mm, and helix angle 0-50°.
We invite all of our customers to visit our factory to see the lean, modern shaper cutter manufacturing process first hand.
