Why Is Lining Up Of A Spherical

Why is aligning up the tip of a spherical gear one of the greatest design ideas in engineering? At first, engineers were excited about one simple idea. If you make a gear into a sphere, it can turn corners. And yes, that part is obvious. A normal gear can only transmit power in one flat plane. Once the angle changes, the teeth may separate, but a spherical gear spreads its teeth across the surface of a ball. So, even when the direction changes, it still has a chance to keep sending power, but at the same time, this is also its biggest problem. Slipsing. If two spherical gears are just press together randomly, the raised teeth may hit raised teeth. That is not meshing, that is just locking up. And if the contact point is wrong, they may act like two textured balls sliding across each other. So how do you make the teeth actually mesh? The gear has to find a starting point first. That point is the tip. This tip is not decoration. It is more like the first entrance of the spherical gear. The first set of teeth has to enter the opposite grooves from here. Only then can the next teeth bite in one after another. It is just like zipping up a jacket. If the starting point is wrong, tooth tip hits tooth tip and the whole thing jams. So the real power of this tip is that it tells the spherical gear where to start bying. Only after finding this entrance, it becomes a real mechanical structure that can transmit power.