• Scam Alert. Members are reminded to NOT send money to buy anything. Don't buy things remote and have it shipped - go get it yourself, pay in person, and take your equipment with you. Scammers have burned people on this forum. Urgency, secrecy, excuses, selling for friend, newish members, FUD, are RED FLAGS. A video conference call is not adequate assurance. Face to face interactions are required. Please report suspicions to the forum admins. Stay Safe - anyone can get scammed.

RF30 Basement Install

The idea is to skootch your vise over 4-5" off centre. This gives you the *opportunity* to mount the RT without moving your vise away (most of the time). No one leaves their RT on their mill full time. It's just in the way.

This is fine for most small work. Once the job gets bigger, you need the RT in the centre of the table anyway, so the vise has to go.

Thanks for the clarification, I thought this was supposed to be a permanent arrangement. Now to move my vise back and re-tram it LOL.

BTB - The RT didn't budge when I did the plate milling. I'm very pleased with that.
 
So, now that I have a 6" HV RT I want to try some gear cutting. I sourced some indexing plates from Amazon that shipped from India, a set of DP 16 PA 14.5 cutters with R8 arbor from Amazon and a Grizzly tail stock from @140mower (Thanks Don).
Setup.JPG


First go will be a 14T 1" Dia gear made from aluminum. This is my setup. I'm a little perplexed as to how to set the cutter height?

CutterHeight.JPG


Do you think this is close enough?

Craig
 
Last edited:
Touch off on the flat of the cutter then lower by 1/2 cutter dia & work dia or you could use the ruler thing between the workpiece and cutter.
 
Well..... It looks like a gear, smells like a gear, has 14 teeth........:p

Gear.JPG


I think the teeth are a little too deep.

I used this website to calculate the tooth depth.

Inputs
Number of Teeth: 14
Diametral Pitch: 16
Pressure Angle: 14.5 degrees
Gear Type: External

Outputs
Tip Diameter: 25.40 mm 1.00 in
Pitch Diameter: 22.22 mm 0.88 in
Root Diameter: 18.26 mm 0.72 in

Addendum: 1.59 mm 0.06 in
Dedendum: 1.98 mm 0.08 in
Working Depth: 3.17 mm 0.13 in
Whole Depth: 3.57 mm 0.14 in
Circular Pitch: 4.99 mm 0.20 in

© 2021 Evolvent Design, 18-Nov-2021

Mesh.JPG


Meshes OK with what I was trying to replicate.
 
Last edited:
Looks fun and appears you are off to a good start. I haven't been able to try gear cutting on my mill yet, the only bit I've done was on my lathe with a homemade setup.
Do you have a gear tooth gauge or how do you determine the needed gear profile?
 
@YYCHM : Whole Depth (Preferred) ht = 2.250 ÷ P so for 16DP your cutter depth is 0.141"

0.14 is what I dialed in. Why does this gear have such a narrow flat on the top of each tooth (0.03)? Doesn't look like the one I was trying to replicate (0.06).
 
Last edited:
Do you have a gear tooth gauge or how do you determine the needed gear profile?

No, I don't have any gauges to measure gears. @RobinHood has examined gears from both my lathe and shaper and both were determined to be 16 DP 14.5 PA so I just went with that for a starter set of cutters.
 
@YYCHM : You have to remember that the simple spur gear cutters arranged in the 8 tooth profile all cut a variety of # of teeth. So the cutter will only be "somewhat" accurate over the range of teeth it can produce. Using a hob will allow the teeth to be cut with a more accurate profile over the whole span of tooth number due to its design, cutter angle etc.

Also check the depth of the tooth profile in the one you are trying to copy. It may be that the manufacturer cut slightly shallower tooth to match something in the product. You can mess around with the back lash in this way.
 
Today I tried cutting the same gear in mild steel......

SteelGear.JPG


I setup ala @RobinHood style and spritzed it with cutting fluid ever pass.

200 RPM which is 20 HZ on the VFD. I was really surprised and pleased that my mill would cut a full depth tooth 0.13 in one pass without complaining.

SGear1.JPG


SGear2.JPG


I'm trying to replicate a feed drive gear that's on my shaper. The original gear is on the right.

Wish I had a wire wheel to knock all the burrs off the cut gear:( Still need to cut the key way. Will need to rig something up on the shaper and that will be this afternoons project.
 
Last edited:
Nice results! So how are you feeding, like conventional mill one way & climb cut back out. Or no climb at all or...? What about depth, full pass or 80/20 or?

Rather than a wire wheel I use ~ 1" x 1/8" thk rubberized abrasive wheels just in my Dremel. They are dirt cheap on Ali/Amazon & come in multitude of flavors. On Ali you sometimes have to dig into polishing or jewelry keywords. I can dig up the grit specs, but generally for for steel, the coarser (green) ones work well. The finer ones are more towards polishing or softer alloys where you want to control removal rate. I mean if its a heavy burr, best to knock it off with a file or whatever, but for crisper faceted edges & blending the rubber is great. I bought a few Cratex (USA?) brand from KBC just to try. They are probably a better quality but not enough to justify the price difference. But Cratex makes sticks & shapes I can't find the equivalent as readily via same Asia suppliers.
 
Nice results! So how are you feeding, like conventional mill one way & climb cut back out. Or no climb at all or...? What about depth, full pass or 80/20 or?

Rather than a wire wheel I use ~ 1" x 1/8" thk rubberized abrasive wheels just in my Dremel. They are dirt cheap on Ali/Amazon & come in multitude of flavors. On Ali you sometimes have to dig into polishing or jewelry keywords. I can dig up the grit specs, but generally for for steel, the coarser (green) ones work well. The finer ones are more towards polishing or softer alloys where you want to control removal rate. I mean if its a heavy burr, best to knock it off with a file or whatever, but for crisper faceted edges & blending the rubber is great. I bought a few Cratex (USA?) brand from KBC just to try. They are probably a better quality but not enough to justify the price difference. But Cratex makes sticks & shapes I can't find the equivalent as readily via same Asia suppliers.

Not sure what you mean by climb cut back out? I fed the blank into the cutter and then backed up and positioned the bank for the next tooth. First tooth I cut to depth in two 50/50 stages. That went well so I tried full depth on the second tooth and that was ok as well, so every tooth there after was cut full depth in one pass.

What is this rubberized abrasive wheel you mentioned. I can't picture how that would get between the gear teeth like a wire wheel would. Have link you could post?
 
That was probably a good decision to go that big. I used 1.5hp and wonder if it would have enough grunt to do the same as you did at 20hz.

Seems to work well at low HZ. I've done lots of 20-30 HZ 1/2"-1" drilling with it. Also, 2" face milling and fly cutting 2+". The original single phase motor was 2HP and I was really tempted to up that with the 3 phase motor, but so far so good.

Also, I think my VFD is one of those torque compensating units and 3HP.
 
Last edited:
Looks like you got the hang of it. Nice looking gear. The nice thing about the gear you are making is that it is a slow moving one and I think they only fail when someone allows the travel to exceed it's limits. I have a few gears to make for my big shaper as well, but that's not going to be this years project. ;)
 
Well.... I think I can call my gear making venture a success...

XGear.JPG


VGear.JPG


Fits and functions just as well as the original.

Fail.JPG


Cutting the keyway into it turned into a bit of an adventure... On my first attempt to make a tool holder for the shaper I broke a 1/8" endmill trying to cut a tool slot in 1/2" round. There after I lost track of depth of cut and cut the slot too deep (top item). On the second attempt I made it all the way to tapping the hole for securing the cutting tool in the holder when I discovered I hadn't drilled the hole deep enough to allow the tap to cut full size thread. My attempt to use a bottom tap didn't go well at all (bottom item).

BBar.JPG



So then I decided to make a sleeve to hold my 3/8" boring bar. That worked to a point. First off I ground the cutting tool just a tad too narrow and secondly a 3/8" bar with a protruding cutting tool is a really tight fit in a 1/2" bore. Setting up was a PITA. In the end it did cut enough of a keyway (too narrow and too shallow) for me finish off with a needle file.

So, now I'm confident I can make usable gears with my little mill which was the purpose of this exercise in the first place.

I do how ever plan to post a critique of the RT dividing plate kit I got from Amazon as it was not usable out of the box.

Craig
 
Last edited:
Back
Top