Homemade HDPE gears for weapons?

[SethsDad]

This one might get filed under "another of Pete's crazy ideas" but...I've been doing a lot of late night sums using the Team Runamok electric hammer spreadsheet (http://runamok.tech/AskAaron/tools.html). I'm trying to see if its worth making a snail cam to try to give our planned hammer some more ooomph and maximise its grin factor.

While doing that I've been trying to work out gear ratios galore and I'm stuck in that loop of not wanting to buy anything yet until I'm 100% sure and ideally would like some options to play around with different ratios. This lead me to the https://woodgears.ca/ site and a crazy late night idea. Could we make our own gears out of 15mm HDPE? If so then we could make any ratio or mix we like and allow us to test them out.

Anyone think HDPE would be strong enough for a featherweight axe? I know chain is the normal way to go but this might be an alternative and as a bonus I can make them with my boy on the bandsaw or CNC router so another chance to learn something for us both.

[Ocracoke]

I want to say "yes" but in order to withstand the torque, the teeth, and thus the whole gear itself, is going to have to be of considerable size to be strong enough I think, which would limit the number of teeth you could have. It'd look really cool though, it is part of the reason why I use a solid gear system on my axe in my middleweight.

[Shakey]

It's a technique I use a lot, mostly in smaller bots. But plastic gears can work really well, I prefer Nylon 6 over HDPE as it has a bit more strength for it but HDPE still works well. The trick is to simply over size the MOD as much as you can get away with, and if you can't get that high enough to compress a gear between two metal plates.