Free gear SVG files

Tooth counts, sizes and what will cut

Every single gear here is 100 mm across the tips of its teeth, so the more teeth it has, the smaller each tooth is. At that size the twelve-tooth gear has teeth about 9 mm wide, the twenty-four-tooth gear about 5 mm, and the forty-eight-tooth gear about 3 mm. Halve the gear and the teeth halve too.

For vinyl, keep each tooth at least 1.5 mm wide: the twelve and eight-tooth gears work down to 20 mm across, while the fine gear and the clock wheel are better at 60 mm or more. For 3 mm plywood or acrylic on a laser, allow for the width of the cut, which trims every tooth a little on both sides.

Gears that mesh, and gears that work

Two gears mesh only when their teeth are the same size. In the files with two, three or five gears, every gear shares one tooth size and is turned so that each tooth meets a gap. If you pull those gears apart to cut them separately, scale them all by the same amount or they will no longer fit.

These are drawings of gears, with straight-sided teeth. They look right and will turn each other as a toy or a display, but a real machine needs teeth with a curved involute profile. For a working mechanism, use a gear generator and treat these as decoration.

How to open the files

• Cricut Design Space: choose Upload, pick the SVG, and add it to the canvas. Set the width you want; the shape is already welded.
• Silhouette Studio: Designer Edition and above open the SVG. The free Basic Edition does not, so open the DXF instead.
• LightBurn, xTool Creative Space and Glowforge: import the SVG, then set the layer to cut, score or engrave.
• Inkscape, Illustrator and Affinity: open the SVG. It is a plain filled path, so you can recolour it, add a stroke or combine it with your own work.
• Printing or sublimation: use the PNG, which has a transparent background.

Each design page lists the file’s narrowest part at seven sizes, so you can tell whether it will survive at the size you plan to cut.

Questions