To broach the 6mm key way, I needed to make a single lip broaching tool. I found a suitable 1/4” piece of HSS and a 1/2” boring bar that I could then hold in a collet in the mill.
Since there was not enough room on the Clarkson T&CG for both a vise and the spindexer, I mounted everything on the mag chuck of the Ingar surface grinder.
The profile I was after looks something like this.
Set-up on the mill.
Turns out that this cutting edge geometry was too aggressive and required a lot of force to push through the 4330 steel bore. The tool kept digging in - when it did cut. Lots of tool deflection as well. I also lost the cutting edge about 1.5mm into the 3mm depth.
So back to the surface grinder to change the geometry. I basically went for a scraper style edge this time around, as seen here.
That worked much, much better. The cutting forces were greatly reduced with 1thou DoC. Also, the cut was totally controllable and no digging in of the tool. The cutting edge stayed very sharp to the end.
You can see the huge difference in the chips produced. Left is the negative rake edge chips, on the right are the scraper style edge chips.
Had to step-over 0.23mm on each side to get the key way width to just a shade over 6mm as the tool was intentionally ground to < 6mm wide.
All done & installed.
The final weight of the hand wheel is 8 lbs 4.5 oz. That is over 40 lbs of 4330 chips to whittle this thing out from a solid disc. Casting is definitely the way to go if you are making more than one…