Leo found it.
There was a time, not long ago, when building anything with gears meant one of two things: scavenging old printers for plastic wheels that never quite fit, or learning a thousand-dollar CAD program just to make a single 3D-printable part.
Ideal for creating STL files quickly for 3D printing. online gear generator
Leo knew this pain intimately.
Online generators create mathematically perfect involutes. In the real world, gears need (play between teeth) to account for thermal expansion and manufacturing tolerances. Leo found it
For engineers using software like SolidWorks or Fusion 360, generating a gear usually involves opening a specific toolbox, defining constraints, or building a sketch from scratch. Online generators strip this down to a single screen. A user can adjust the tooth count from 20 to 40 and see the center distance update in real-time.
The site looked like it hadn’t been updated since the early 2000s. Beige background. Comic Sans headers. A single JavaScript slider for “Number of Teeth” that went from 6 to 200. There was no 3D preview—just a flat, black-and-white SVG wireframe that regenerated every time you twitched the mouse. Leo knew this pain intimately
Using STL exports to create working plastic gears via FDM or SLA printing.
The generator performs the complex trigonometry in the background and outputs a visual representation and a downloadable file.