Impulsive sound and vibration signals in gear system are often associated with their faults. Thus these impulsive sound and vibration signals can be used as indicators in condition monitoring of gear system. The traditional continuous wavelet transform has been used for detection of impulsive signals. However, it is often difficult for the continuous wavelet transform to identify spikes at high frequency and meshing frequencies at low frequency simultaneously since the continuous wavelet transform is to apply the linear scaling (a-dilation) to the mother wavelet. In this paper, the spike wavelet transform is developed to extract these impulsive sound and vibration signals. Since the spike wavelet transform is to apply the non-linear scaling, it has better time resolution at high frequency and frequency resolution at low frequency than that of the continuous wavelet transform respectively. The spike wavelet transform can be, therefore, used to detect fault position clearly without the loss of information for the damage of a gear system. The spike wavelet transform is successfully is applied to detection of the gear fault with tip breakage.