Backlashes of gears provide gears for good lubrication and for removal of the interference between teeth by the wear and manufacturing errors. The backlash is the strong nonlinear factor to gears. This study deals with nonlinear modeling of helical gears with backlash. Excitation of helical gears comes from torque variation, the tooth surface error, and the periodical change of mesh stiffness. To study the effect of torque fluctuation, equation of motion for the single degree of freedom torsional model of helical gears with the periodical change of mesh stiffness and the backlash was derived. The Newmark beta method and the Newton-Raphson method were used to obtain the nonlinear behaviors of mesh forces of helical gears. All excitation frequencies initially caused the tooth separation and single-sided impacts of the gear pair and eventually led to the normal tooth contact. However, some special excitation frequencies caused the single-sided impacts in the entire time as well as the initial time. Damping increase reduced the duration of single-sided impacts, and the backlash increase caused those in the entire time domain.