
Unboxing a vintage gear set - mhb
https://www.evilmadscientist.com/2018/unboxing-a-vintage-gear-set/
======
jacquesm
Those look fresh as the day they were made. The real engineering is not in the
gears by the way, but in the cutting machine that cuts the spiral gears.
Cutting straight gears is hard enough, spiral drive ones are impossible
without special machinery.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cT7GMUiEp7c](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cT7GMUiEp7c)

(never mind the audio and the intro...)

~~~
kragen
Can't you cut helical gears with a lathe and a two-axis contouring milling
cutter? Or is that not precise enough? (Or are you just saying that a lathe
with live tooling is "special machinery"?)

~~~
jacquesm
I've had a lot of tooling, including lathes, mills, plasmacutters and welders,
never had a setup that could have cut helical gears with any fidelity.

I think it is special machinery if you won't find it in 90%+ or so of well
equipped machine shops.

------
userbinator
This could be the "waxy" coating on them:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmoline](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmoline)

~~~
monochromatic
Doesn’t look like cosmoline to me, too solid. I think wax is right.

~~~
hansthehorse
Cosmoline is the bane of World War rifle collectors. It soaks into the wood
and is almost impossible to get completely out. I spent a week cleaning a
Finnish Mosin and still didn't get it all.

~~~
monochromatic
Yeah, I've done that drill myself. It's not fun, but you just have to keep
reminding yourself that the rifle would be rusted to hell without the
cosmoline.

------
blt
What is special / unusual about the splines? ("Check out those cut splines in
the middle!") It looks like normal spline drive to me.

~~~
jnellis
Nothing. I used to work in a gear shop. These are/were done with a broach, no
skill required.

------
chrisdhoover
As a certified gear head, this post brings me great joy. Along with the reddit
post where some dude proved some test wrong by modeling the gears, I’ve had a
geat week and it is only Wednesday. Now to go shift my 901 transmission some
more.

~~~
war1025
Do you have a link to the reddit post? That sounds interesting

------
fermienrico
You want to be careful about the foam padding. There is a possibility that it
could be made from Asbestos.

~~~
Aloha
That seems like an unlikely use for asbestos - asbestos was mostly used when a
heat retardant was needed.

~~~
NeedMoreTea
It had some really surprising, and quite common, uses in the war through to
70's era. Fabrics, cigarette filters, paints, fillers as it was so cheap.

Heat retardant and insulation were the headline uses.

~~~
jonhendry18
Floor tile. Used in the US into the mid 70s. Lots of it still out there.

------
SiempreViernes
Man, gear from the 50's should at most count as "retro", vintage gear to me
sounds more like something from the early 19 century. Gears are hella old!

~~~
jonhendry18
Early 19th would be "antique".

