I know I`m going to get an absolute hammering for this especially off Swarfing, but I started off with EMC2 and don`t have a bad word to say, it got me going and was all free! I would consider myself a decent computer user but having never used linux before, I found EMC2 tricky to get my head around when wanting to do anything but the basic functions. BUT I did install windows and have since run Mach3 on it. Mach3 was much easier to setup and the user interface can`t be beat! Despite all my tweeking of emc2, I still couldn`t get my motors to move as fast and smooth as I could with Mach3 - which I know makes no sense and the issue must have only been due to my inability to setup EMC properly, but it did show how easy Mach3 was to get up and going and to the best setup!
Anyway... enough on that before I get myself slaughtered by the linux crew! I have no doubt that if I knew what I was doing in emc, I could have got an identical setup than I have in Mach so I blame it on my inability! But on the flip side, it shows how easy it is to get Mach3 up a running with best setup.
Today I attempted a few more gears, big and small and practiced layouts in vcarve. I wanted to utilise wood/space and so attempted to cut a few smaller pinions in the crossing out areas of the bigger wheels. The third round disk is just a spacer washer.
The gear is 150mm and my wood is a scrap I had lying around at just the right size..infact, 151mm gives me little error in my alignment! Screwed the wood down to an mdf sacrifical piece with some double sided tape as well...
I did this in 4 steps:
Step 1: cut all the centre holes, this allowed me to go around and screw each part down so it didn`t pop out and get caught in the cutter at the end of each piece

Step 2: Cut all the pinions and spacer:
Step3: Crossing out:
Step 4: Cutting the teeth
And out it all popped...well, when I had unscrewed it all:

Really enjoyed this little project and learnt a lot.
Chris