>>>>>>>>>>I also have a photograph around here somewhere, of a wormwheel being free-wheel hobbed with a tap held in the lathe chuck.>>>>>>>>>>>
Been there - done that very successfully several times.. The biggest problem is in getting the wheel blank to be the right size before cutting and in taking an appropriate sized bite out of it on the first run round with the tap to establish the right number of teeth - its a bit hit-and-miss. Having said that, I have made a number of wormwheels which have worked very well including the one on my current 4th axis. In this case, I wanted one of 90T and the first attempt produced one with 92T - I could have used that one with no problems but I decided to have another go and the second one gave me 90T with no problems. Its made of brass and, since I wanted to be able to dismantle the rotary without too much effort, I decided I needed straight teeth, not concave as are made by a single pass of the tap, and so I cut the wheel on my little horizontal miller and, once the teeth were formed and to depth, gently tracked the table up and down to cut the teeth to the edge of the brass blank. The worm is just a length of screwed rod the same size as the tap - lathe cut on decent quality and finish stainless steel.... You can see the wormwheel and worm after a couple of years regular use at http://www.watchman.talktalk.net/temp/Rotary%20table/rot1.jpg Ian W. Wright Sheffield UK ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Download Intel® Parallel Studio Eval Try the new software tools for yourself. Speed compiling, find bugs proactively, and fine-tune applications for parallel performance. See why Intel Parallel Studio got high marks during beta. http://p.sf.net/sfu/intel-sw-dev _______________________________________________ Emc-users mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users
