GearForge.online was born from a simple frustration — gear design shouldn't require an expensive software license, a desktop install, or a steep learning curve. We built the tool we always wished existed.
Every engineer who has designed a gear train knows the routine: dig out a reference book, cross-check module tables, manually compute pitch diameters, sketch the geometry, realise you made a typo three calculations back, start again. It's 2026. This shouldn't be hard.
Commercial tools like AGMA gear software, KISSsoft and Romax Designer are excellent — and price-tagged accordingly. Many students, freelance engineers, small workshops and hobbyists simply can't justify the cost of a full professional suite just to calculate whether a 32-tooth module-2 spur gear meshes with a 64-tooth one.
GearForge started as a weekend project: a single HTML file with a bit of JavaScript that rendered a spur gear SVG from module and teeth count. Within a few days it grew arms — helical support, a DXF exporter, a bevel gear page. We kept going because the need was clearly real.
Today GearForge covers six gear types, generates production-quality SVG, DXF, STL and PNG files, lets you save and reload designs, and runs entirely in a browser without a single desktop download. We're proud of that — and we're just getting started.
Our mission is to make precision mechanical design accessible to every engineer on the planet, regardless of budget, geography or employer.
Remove every unnecessary barrier between an engineer's idea and a production-ready gear file. Fast calculations, honest geometry, no paywalls on the core tools.
A future where any engineer, student or maker anywhere in the world can design a gear train, simulate its behaviour and send it to a manufacturer — all from a browser tab, all in an afternoon.
Spur gear SVG preview, pitch diameter and outside diameter calculation, first DXF exporter. Proved the concept worked in a browser with no dependencies.
Added helical, bevel, worm, rack & pinion and internal (ring) gear tools, each with dedicated real-time preview, Quick Dimensions panel, and four export formats including STL.
User registration, cloud-saved designs, dashboard, admin panel with user and content management, site settings, maintenance mode, and legal pages.
Multi-gear layout canvas to compose full gear trains, calculate compound ratios, check centre distances and visualise meshing in real time.
Add torque, speed and material inputs to calculate bending stress, contact stress and safety factors following ISO 6336 / AGMA 2101 standards.
Every decision about what to build, how to build it, and what to charge for it comes back to these six principles.
We use the exact involute gear geometry equations, not simplified approximations. If the maths is wrong, nothing else matters. Every dimension you see is calculated from first principles.
Engineers iterate in their heads at speed. GearForge updates the preview as you type — no Generate button, no waiting. The interface should keep up with your thinking, not slow it down.
Your files are yours. We export to open, vendor-neutral formats — SVG, DXF, STL — that work in every major CAD and slicer tool. We will never generate proprietary formats that lock you in.
Gear design is genuinely complex. Our job is to hide that complexity behind a clear, well-labelled interface so that an experienced engineer is fast and a student isn't lost.
No install. No licence key. No OS requirement. A Chromebook in a school workshop should work as well as a workstation in an R&D lab. Accessibility means more than just screen readers.
We store only what you save intentionally. No telemetry scripts, no third-party trackers embedded in the tool pages. Your design parameters stay in your account.
We chose boring, proven technology on purpose. The stack should disappear — you should only notice the tool.
Plain PHP with no framework overhead. Fast cold starts, simple deployment on any shared host or VPS. PDO handles both MySQL/MariaDB and PostgreSQL.
All six gear type renderers are written in pure JavaScript outputting inline SVG. Zero runtime dependencies, zero framework churn. Ships in a single 12 KB file.
The gear preview is a live SVG element in the DOM, not a canvas bitmap. That means it's crisp at any zoom level, accessible, and directly downloadable as a vector file.
Design parameters are stored as structured JSON. The schema is minimal on purpose — three tables (users, designs, settings). Self-hosted installs run on any database.
The server-side STL writer takes the gear outline polyline, triangulates top and bottom faces, and stitches the side walls — producing a watertight mesh ready for any slicer.
No Tailwind, no Bootstrap. One authored stylesheet that knows exactly what it needs to style. Loads in one request, no purge step, no build pipeline required.
GearForge is designed to be self-hosted. Drop it on any shared hosting plan, VPS or Docker container. Run the installer, point it at a MySQL or PostgreSQL database, and you have a fully private gear design platform for your team or workshop.
The admin panel lets you control branding, toggle registration, enable maintenance mode and manage users — all without touching code.
No account required to use the tools. Sign up only when you want to save your work.