Loft face of involute gear works, loft 2d offset of same face doesn't

[oldmachine]

I love gears and have designed / made wood and plastic clocks… fun!

I won’t comment on the usefulness of what you’re trying to accomplish but, will point out that it is easy to do.

I did this via Part workbench (though, I always start with a PartDesign and Part/Body, even if it's not used.).

Using Part Design workbench to First get the gear sketch (though, it’s not called a sketch). I used the Gear Icon in PartDesign.

After getting a gear shape to extrude (Pad),

Switch to Part workbench and create a Helix.
Sweep the gear sketch (solid and frenet = checked).
Now have Gear1.

Make another Helix and shift it’s Z-position to place it above Gear1.

Sweep again (the first gear will show in the selection panel - select it for the item to sweep).

Select the second helix for the path and, Bingo, you now have Two gears.

You can make them One gear by doing “Compound”.

Now, copy the compound without ref’s and Paste it.

Shift it’s Z-position to place it above the first compound.

Bingo, you get a stack of 4 gears… compound if desired.

NOTE: when stacking them, you’ll most likely need to rotate the first gear so as to align the teeth. I needed to rotate about 8.3 deg’s but, I did not worry about the exactness of it for this example…

Either way, you can export a nice, solid .STL that has Zero errors in a slicing program… shown in Simplify3d and Slic3r.
You can also 'not' compound them and select each gear and export at same time to get One printable gear, full gear... you choose your weapon!

[meme2704]

Hi oldmachine,
Do you notice that Geobruce wants to graft a pinion "Citroen chevron module 1.5 x 17 teeth with another module 1.2 x 20 teeth which causes this monster

[oldmachine]

Yes, I noticed.

My point was/is to enable stacking gears to get one completed gear.
Whether it's a good design or, not. As, I stated

I won’t comment on the usefulness of what you’re trying to accomplish

Different numbers of teeth, transitions between them... etc...

[geobruce]

You can make them One gear by doing “Compound”.

Thank you this helped me a lot.