This paper proposes an approach of building an expert system for designing gear drives. In terms of gear drives the relationship between expert systems and data base systems is explained and a data base system for design, failure detection, and trouble-shooting of gear drives is built on a personal computer by the data manipulation language of dBASE III. This paper proposes a method how to build a data base system and what to consider to build a data base system for gear drives and two kinds of data base systems of design and failure detection of gear drives and trouble-shooting for noise and vibration of gear drives are built. The two data base systems are very effective for the retrieval of information for the gear design, and they will be considerably helpful for the gear design.