Summary

I've been making gears and cogs out of 1/18" basswood from amazon... Wooden washers too! The pieces in my design file pretty much comes together like lego pieces. Glue them together!

I didn't expect them to work! The one shown in this post is 1:1, so nothing too special, aside from how perfectly everything fits together and how smooth they are!

Video attached to this post of me turning the gears with one hand. It works! It lives! It's alive!

Anyway. Xtool's grid array feature made it really easy to zap out those gears and washers in bulk! I happened to have a bunch of 6mm wide wooden bamboo sticks laying around, so I zapped 6mm holes into the middle of a random set of gears I found online, and... Kinda funny how well it worked after I added sheaths around where the teeth meets, taken from the middle of the big cogs!

At first, it was a bit hard to turn the gears, but after I clamped a drill onto one of the axles and ran the drill for a few minutes at max speed, the rough bits got worked out of the gears now it turns silky smooth without slipping.

I used a little paint brush and some wood glue to stick everything together. I glued wooden washers to the rods after slipping them through the axels, and... Bam bam bam, a wooden gearbox!

I'm working on a 1:2 gearbox, so far... It seems to work just fine! Using those same gears, you can go pretty far before the gears explodes from friction!

I bet that if I dunk the entire thing in oil, vaseline, something slippy, everything'll start working even better! Also less likely the gearbox explodes into flames at high speeds. Fun!