Hobbing

For other uses, see Hob (disambiguation).
Not to be confused with Hobbling.
A hob — the cutter used for hobbing.

Hobbing is a machining process for gear cutting, cutting splines, and cutting sprockets using a hobbing machine, a specialized milling machine. The teeth or splines of the gear are progressively cut into the material (such as a flat, cylindrical piece of metal or thermoset plastic) by a series of cuts made by a cutting tool called a hob.

Hobbing is relatively fast and inexpensive compared to most other gear-forming processes and is used for a broad range of parts and quantities.[1] Hobbing is especially common for machining spur and helical gears.[2]

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).[3]

  1. ^ American Society for Metals, Cubberly & Bardes 1978, p. 334.
  2. ^ Drozda et al. 1983, p. 13‐34.
  3. ^ Weppelmann, E; Brogni, J (March 2014), "A breakthrough in power skiving", Gear Production: A Supplement to Modern Machine Shop: 7–12, retrieved 2014-03-11.