Design engineers face continuous pressure to enhance product performance while driving down costs. For many devices, converting metal components to plastic is an effective way of achieving both goals.

Plastic gears can bring many advantages to power transmission designs, says UFE Senior Product Engineer Andrew Ulrich. First among them is cost-effective manufacturing by molding rather than hobbing, ...

The use of plastic gears is limited, largely because it takes special expertise to design them properly. Too, many engineers deal with gears so infrequently, The use of plastic gears is limited, ...

This article was updated March 6, 2023. It was originally published Aug. 1, 2001. Gears—even plastic ones—need to be lubricated if engineers are going to coax the best performance out of them. In the ...

Plastic gears molded of Vestakeep polyetheretherketone (PEEK) from Evonik are being used in automobile transmissions reportedly for the first time. To replace metal gears, Evonik developed a PEEK ...

Makers, engineers and hobbyists who would like to automatically manufacture a variety of different size plastic gears you might be interested in a unique machine built using a little Arduino hardware, ...

If you need an example of something that is unequivocally bad for the environment, here’s a suggestion: plastic water bottles. One million are sold each minute across the world, and though they’re ...

It’s very likely that a majority of readers will have had a gear fail in a piece of equipment, causing it to be unrepairable. This is a problem particularly with plastic gears, which shed teeth faster ...

It’s very likely that a majority of readers will have had a gear fail in a piece of equipment, causing it to be unrepairable. This is a problem particularly with plastic gears, which shed teeth faster ...