I really enjoy your videos, it looks like a labor of love. You have spent a lot of time with all the tooling you had to make to get that old mill working. Very Nice set up. One suggestion I would make. If you had more gears you could leave your index gears set up with 90/45 45/N (any two gears of the same pitch.) Then you would only have to change one gear, (the number of teeth you are cutting,) it would be a less chance of error and easier set up. Joe G. 🙂
Thanks, Joe! I agree with your comment, with one exception: you have to have a gear with tooth count N to make a gear with tooth count N. So, for me the only way to make a 37 tooth gear would be a tooth at a time on the vertical mill. That’s really what led me to the differential setup: I can make any tooth count gear (even, odd, prime number) with only even numbered change gears. Also, I just wanted to prove to myself I could make all this stuff!
I really liked your catch-pan. When cutting gears with coolant or oil the small chips always ends up where I don't want them. With a pan like that with a decent volume and the outlet high up, and maybe a baffle, I imagine 99% of the chips would be caught in the pan.
Thanks for making this video. The explanation is very clear. I've wanted to make a Holzapfel geometric chuck for a while and watched a video about one many times. I always got scared by the gear trains as it looks complicated. After watching and understading your (this) video I watched the geometric chuck video again and I now realise that it is actually straightforward.
