Complementing our Gear Cutting service we also provide a wide range of splined shafts. We manufacture custom splines to exact specifications. Through our many years of experience, we have the knowledge and expertise to produce external and internal spline gears to fit almost any application.
What are Splines?
Splines are ridges of teeth cut onto a drive shaft that mesh with grooves in a mating piece and transfer torque to it, maintaining the angular correspondence between them and can be used in many mechanical transmissions. Also, helical and spur gears can be cut onto the shaft to give a dual drive as required in some industries.
To prevent stress concentrations the ends of the splines are chamfered (as opposed to an abrupt vertical end). Such stress concentrations are a primary cause of failure in poorly designed splines. An alternative to splines is a keyway and key, though splines provide a longer fatigue life, and can carry significantly greater torques for the size.
What are Splines used for?
Typical uses of splines are automotive including heavy duty steering units for commercial and earth moving vehicles. Also widely used on commercial winches, power brakes, classic vehicles plus many other industries that require a positive drive system.
Splines or Gears?
A splined shaft is designed to transmit torque just as gears are also designed to transmit torque and can work quite similarly. As such, it can be easy to confuse the two, or understate the individual importance of each.
One key difference is that the splined shaft transfers torque by way of its externally splined shaft mating with an internal shaft that has slots for the external shaft’s teeth. In gears, the teeth of the driven shaft can either be internally or externally placed. The meshing of gears also only utilizes one tooth at a time, and not all of them at once as with the case of splines.
A splined shaft can come with square-sided or triangular splines, while the teeth of a gear can have curves. Because of this, the usage of splined shafts and gears are not always interchangeable.
Cost Effective Spline Manufacturing
Bronte can manufacture splines on shafts conventionally cut on gear cutting machines. We specialise in low volume requirements meaning we can offer cost effective spline manufacturing. Request a quote now by emailing mail@bpel.co.uk, include drawings and any other relevant information and we will get back to you with a quote as soon as possible.
