Sorry about that resizing issue - it’s something that Inkscape does to files sometimes - I’ve gotten hit with it before when I tried to open Inkscape files. Are you running the latest version of Inkscape? (v0.92 or later?)
Don’t try to join all of the gear points at the same time - lock everything else down and just do about a fourth of them at a time. Then join another quarter, then a third, etc. After you are done you’ll have four quarters that can be joined.
Better chance of success. 
Yes on latest version of Inkscape; version 0.92.2.
By going into Inkscape Objects, I can select a number of adjacent gear points. Then I Joined these. But the first and last point were then connected as well as the correctly joined points in between. So that’s when I decided to try joining then all in one swoop. Could be move Pilot error for me. I’ll try that again before the overnight run.
Ah, so you’d need to unjoin the two endpoints before proceeding…might still be worth it if you can do a big batch at once.
Success this morning … finally! And thanks to all the help.
Never got the unjoin to work. So could not use the Join-route.
What worked was using the Selection tool to select groups of teeth and then Path->Combine. Total CPU time for this was about 3:36:00 but it took most of the day and night to select/wait/wait/… before doing the next group of teeth. After scaling Jules’ file up to size, it was 150KB for plain SVG. My final file was 337KB. Whatever you do, Jules, you do well! Maybe I should get something besides Inkscape.
Print finished. Teeth mesh with pinion gear so clock should work!
Again Thank You All.
Be sure to post pics when you build it. 
Thanks for the help, everyone! I’m glad to hear you were able to get this uploaded, @brok09. Thanks for letting us know about this. If you run into any other trouble, please start a new thread or send us an email at support@glowforge.com. Happy printing!