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Making pinions

Various texts describe pinion making as being tricky, requiring a very rigid setup to have a chance of success. The Aciera F1 is provides just such a setup. 

The first pinion I cut was for the third wheel. This is a very short pinion but I decided to only turn down one end of the O1 bar, leaving the end that was held in the collet as thick as possible to increase rigidity. Since the indexing head on the F1 only had a male centre, I left a long pivot and drilled a small hole in the end to be supported by the male centre. 

 

The F1 was prepared for pinion cutting by centring the indexing head on the cutter:
 

And aligning the male centre:

The blank was transferred to the F1 for the leaves to be cut. The full depth of 0.41mm was reached in four cuts, feeding using the leadscrew as recommended in the J Malcolm Wilde text. 

Worm drive for wheel cutting on the Aciera F1

At last, more progress on the tool making. After breaking the cutting tool while making the hob for the worm wheel, I started looking around for off-the-shelf worm drives. A low backlash one came up on eBay for $100 including a stepper motor, so I jumped.

My original plan with the bought drive was to bore out the centre of the worm wheel so that it would fit on the spindle of the direct dividing head (or indexing head) of the Continue reading Worm drive for wheel cutting on the Aciera F1

New ratchet wheel for the Hauser 333

The Hauser 333 was made for cutting gears for street lamp timers, or so I have been told. It does this by having a ratchet wheel with the appropriate number of teeth attached to the workpiece spindle. A worm drive motor is constantly trying to rotate the workpiece spindle spindle through a clutch. The clutch slips until a solenoid releases the pawl, allowing the ratchet wheel to rotate until the pawl catches on the next tooth.

When it arrived in my workshop Continue reading New ratchet wheel for the Hauser 333