A1

A1 is finally underway!

This type of project will be the future for items that I will be producing. The exact nature of the project will be revealed as things progress.

The A1 project requires a number of specially made brass gears. After the gears are designed and calculations completed, work begins.

The brass sheet is first cut into strips of the required size for the gear blanks.

The brass strips are shown here.

After cutting the strips, the gear blanks are punched out to approximate size.

Here are part of the required gear blanks sitting on a brass strip.

After punching the gear blanks, the strips look like this.

In keeping with my policy of running as "green" an operation as possible, I salvage as much of this brass as I can. Left over brass goes to the recycler.

These brass pieces will later be punched to make smaller gears.

These larger gears will be cut on my Chronos wheel engine - one tooth at a time. Shown here is the wheel engine with its indexing plate.

I was fortunate enough to obtain three index plates for this machine. One plate matches the original hole pattern and the second two plates offer additional hole numbers for gears.

Shown here is the original plate and the three new plates.

The original index plate is rather thick metal and the new brass plates are thinner. I decided to replace the original plate and stack all three on the wheel engine. This makes plate storage easier and wheels are always with the machine.

Here are the plates stacked.

The cutter head needs to be removed when changing plates.

The support bar goes on first. Note the indexing arm.

This is everything reassembled.

Here is a closeup of the plate, index arm, and fly cutter.

To cut pinions for the A1 project I will be using my Chronos pinion mill. It is essentially a miniature horizontal milling machine.

To make the required pinions for the A1 project I need to cut 10 leaves in each pinion. The index plates for my pinion mill are notched for 7, 8, and 12 leaves. 4 and 6 leaves can be cut with these plates but not 10. So I need to make a 10 count index plate for the pinion mill. The wheel engine is used for this task.

A 2" aluminum disc is punched, center drilled, and mounted for cutting.

The cutter is a 60 degree point fly cutter ground on my Gorton grinder.

A simple fly cutter is perfect for making the pinion mill index plate.

To make certain that I use the correct holes, I circle them with marker.

For this item I am using every eighth hole in the 80 hole ring on the index plate. This will give me 10 notches as needed for the small index plate.

The plate now looks like this.

It next gets mounted in a pot chuck on my Sheldon lathe.

The center hole gets enlarged and plate cleaned up.

The index plate now looks like this and is ready for the pinion mill.

Here it is mounted on the pinion mill ready to go to work.

The next step will be to prepare the gear blanks for cutting. The actual cutting will be done on the wheel engine using commercial cutters such as those shown below.

Click here to see the spring barrel gear being cut (page 2).