Kawasaki S3 400 Engine & Gearbox

[TDahl]

@kevin58 I wish you luck on your project! I have been working on creating a high-fidelity model of a complex mechanical object (an actual historic Mars spacecraft) for many years now, so I can relate to your vision.

I have modeled a number of gears with SketchUp, including a rate-limiting governor assembly with an escapement mechanism coupled to a small gear train. The following reply includes a 1-minute video demonstration of some animation tech that I developed for it a couple of years ago (the first half shows different short views of the gear action):

Viking '75 Mars Lander High Gain Antenna

Here is another short video of some more animation tests: [Viking Lander HGA Deployment Test Motion Blur and Cables] There are two behaviors being tested, motion-blur and flexible-cable dynamics. Motion-blur is approximated by creating intermediate image frames that capture motion at a smaller incremental step (in other words, at a higher frame rate), and then selectively blending frames together to form the final still frames. In this case, ten intermediate frames were created for…

Drawing conventional gears is fairly simple if you know the gear specifications. If you want to have curved peaks and valleys on the teeth, then the Circle Intersect extension from @slbaumgartner is very handy to make the curves be tangent to the gear tooth faces.