Gear Cutting Setup

[Roger Taylor]

A dividing head is a real luxury for some home shops. I found the pictured indexing head at a flea market and used an eBay plastic gear to cut the timing gear for my Duclos 6 Cycle engine. I was unable to find a brass 32DP, 60 tooth spur gear so I bought a cutter and the progress is shown in the first photo. Direct indexing using an eBay plastic 60 tooth gear made for a simple operation. The finished gear with exhaust cam mounted is next followed by the installation on the engine. A simple direct indexing project taken from an Atlas Press plan is shown on the following link: https://r.search.yahoo.com/_ylt=Awr...age.html/RK=2/RS=dPAmtg0dXwc0PmTrjaVnu_KTxpw-

 

[timo_gross]

A dividing head is a real luxury for some home shops. I found the pictured indexing head at a flea market and used an eBay plastic gear to cut the timing gear for my Duclos 6 Cycle engine. I was unable to find a brass 32DP, 60 tooth spur gear so I bought a cutter and the progress is shown in the first photo. Direct indexing using an eBay plastic 60 tooth gear made for a simple operation. The finished gear with exhaust cam mounted is next followed by the installation on the engine. A simple direct indexing project taken from an Atlas Press plan is shown on the following link: https://r.search.yahoo.com/_ylt=AwrOqnm0akVk4p8tl1xXNyoA;_ylu=Y29sbwNncTEEcG9zAzEEdnRpZAMEc2VjA3Ny/RV=2/RE=1682299701/RO=10/RU=https://www.myheap.com/metalworking/mr-pete-project-page.html/RK=2/RS=dPAmtg0dXwc0PmTrjaVnu_KTxpw-

I saw two variations of it. One was to use a printer to make a template gear, radial index lines or circles then aligning with with a pointer. It seemed fairly accurate if a magnifier is used. Aligning seems more challenging than accurate printing. The other approach was to use a normal 3d printer (like many of us have) to produce an indexing plastic gear. Some 3d printed gears, run and mesh with metal gears surprisingly (almost frustrating) well. I guess for most of our "low precision" stuff it is good enough.