About

gearsketch is a personal notebook about mechanical design and parametric 3D modelling.

I design small machine parts: gears, flanges, fasteners, brackets and the shafts that hold them together. Most of my work happens in parametric CAD, where a part is not a shape but a set of rules that produce the shape. Getting those rules right is the interesting part, and it is what most of these notes are about.

The notes here are the kind I used to keep in a paper notebook: formulas I look up too often, checklists that saved a part from the scrap bin, and the occasional opinion about feature trees. They are written for people who already know their way around a CAD package and want the arithmetic and the reasoning in one place.

A few ground rules

• Drawings on this site are simplified sketches, made for explanation. They are not to scale and not meant for manufacturing.
• Standard values are quoted from the tables I use. Always check the edition of the standard your project requires.
• This site has no comments, no accounts, no cookies and no tracking. It is just pages.

New notes appear when I have something worth writing down, which is not on any particular schedule.