Laser Cutting Gears

A laser doesn't cut an infinitely thin line — the beam removes a small width of material (the kerf), typically 0.1–0.3 mm depending on the laser, material, and power/speed settings. Because the beam's centerline follows the vector path, a part cut exactly on the nominal outline comes out slightly undersized by roughly one kerf width all around (and any hole, like the bore, comes out slightly oversized, since kerf removes material from inside that boundary too).

For a single gear this rounding error is usually negligible, but for a precisely meshing pair it shifts the effective pitch diameter enough to matter. Most laser control software (LightBurn, LaserGRBL, and similar) has a kerf-offset setting that expands the cut path outward by half the kerf width to compensate — measure your laser's actual kerf on a test cut in your chosen material/thickness and dial that in before cutting a full gear set.

Why SVG

Every gear page on this site offers a direct SVG download — a single closed vector path for the tooth profile plus a separate circle for the bore, deliberately kept as plain geometry (no fills, no unnecessary nodes) so it imports as a clean cut path rather than a raster engrave. Set the import to treat strokes as vector cuts, not fills.

Material thickness and module

3–6 mm plywood or MDF handles module 1–2 teeth well. Thinner material (under 3 mm) can go finer, down to module 0.5 or even 0.3 in acrylic, but thin gears of any material are more prone to tooth breakage under load — laser-cut gears are inherently a flat, 2D process, so there's no way to add rim thickness without changing the sheet stock itself. See Gear Backlash for how kerf interacts with the tooth-thinning backlash calculation, and Laser Cut Gears for a condensed practical checklist.