A FreeCAD workbench to create ratchets
Considering manually constructing circular ratchets an annoing task you can now choose between the automated creation of ratchets that allow only for one direction or ratches that allow both directions. For inset mechanisms you can just subtract the generated shape.
Heavily stolen inspired from looooos freecad.gears.
The workbench has been developed and tested with FreeCAD v0.20.
Add one of the desired geometries either as a part or as part of an active body. Change values regarding e.g. size and number of teeth within the models property settings. Possibly edit the Curve-property for inset directed ratchets.
There is not a complete failsafe mechanism to avoid all possible meaningless values!
Expand for directions to manually install this workbench
This workbench can be installed manually by adding the whole folder into the personal FreeCAD folder
- for Linux
/home/user/.local/share/FreeCAD/Mod/ - for Windows
%APPDATA%\FreeCAD\Mod\orC:\Users\username\Appdata\Roaming\FreeCAD\Mod\ - for Windows as portable app
wherever_stored\FreeCADPortable\Data\FreeCADAppData\Mod - for macOS
~/Library/Preferences/FreeCAD/Mod/
Occasionally rename from ratchetWB-master to ratchetWB if downloaded as zip from github
Different languages according to user settings are technically supported - but actually restricted to english by default and german due to my own limitations. This might be more proof-of-concept than actually useful but feel free to contribute :) Since one does usually not switch languages by the minute I did not bother finding out how to update during runtime yet, so FreeCad has to be restarted to have language-changes take effect on this workbench.
Please report bugs to the issue queue and ping the dedicated ratchetWB FreeCAD forum thread to discuss said issue or feedback in general.
ratchetWB is released under the LGPL3+ license. See LICENSE.