Hobbing

Hobbing is a machining process for gear cutting, cutting splines, and cutting sprockets on a hobbing machine, which is a special type of milling machine. The teeth or splines are progressively cut into the workpiece by a series of cuts made by a cutting tool called a hob. Compared to other gear forming processes it is relatively inexpensive but still quite accurate, thus it is used for a broad range of parts and quantities.

It is the most widely used gear cutting process for creating spur and helical gears and more gears are cut by hobbing than any other process since it is relatively quick and inexpensive.

A type of skiving that is analogous to the hobbing of external gears can be applied to the cutting of internal gears, which are skived with a rotary cutter (rather than shaped or broached).

Process

Hobbing uses a hobbing machine with two skew spindles, one mounted with a blank workpiece and the other with the hob. The angle between the hob's spindle and the workpiece's spindle varies, depending on the type of product being produced. For example, if a spur gear is being produced, then the hob is angled equal to the helix angle of the hob; if a helical gear is being produced then the angle must be increased by the same amount as the helix angle of the helical gear. The two shafts are rotated at a proportional ratio, which determines the number of teeth on the blank; for example, if the gear ratio is 40:1 the hob rotates 40 times to each turn of the blank, which produces 40 teeth in the blank. Note that the previous example only holds true for a single threaded hob; if the hob has multiple threads then the speed ratio must be multiplied by the number of threads on the hob. The hob is then fed up into workpiece until the correct tooth depth is obtained. Finally the hob is fed through the workpiece parallel to the blank's axis of rotation.