Want to spiral flute round stock with manual mill/drill. This possible?

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ridgeway

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Would it be possible to set up an indexing head to drive off a mill/drill handwheel so the round stock turns as the part is milling and tramming at the same time? What i would like to do is spiral flute a remington(or other) rifle bolt in my manual mill/drill.

bolt8.jpg
 
It gets done all the time with a universal dividing head. The universals come with sets of gears to be able to drive the head off the tables X-axis.

-Ron
 
You should video that if you go to the trouble of figuring it out. Best of luck.
 
ScrapMetal said:
It gets done all the time with a universal dividing head. The universals come with sets of gears to be able to drive the head off the tables X-axis.

-Ron
Click to expand...
I learned something new today. It could probably be accomplished with bicycle chain sprockets or even timing belt pulleys too. You just gotta do the math to figure out your ratios and your good to go. Sweet!:thinking:
 
If I still have all the pieces, I'll put my rig up and snap a pic or two. I did a spiral groove in a percussion bit shank once. It was a one-off, so was not worried about efficiency, but it worked pretty well. I used #35 chain and sprockets.....anyway, a pic will do better.
 
Actually, I've seen a couple of videos in youtube about this topic.
That was a long time ago, so I don't remember names, But I can clearly remember seeing same thing done as described above.
 
You may be able to use the change gears from a small lathe and a modified 5C spin indexer spindle and tailstock
 
ridgeway said:
Its Shars, but would this be what I need? Anything better quality out there? Everything I keep seeing is Super spacers and semi universal dividing heads.


http://www.shars.com/products/view/355/914quot_Universal_Dividing_Head
Click to expand...

That looks like it would do the job although I would probably be cruising around on E-bay looking for something of better (assuming) quality for that price - http://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_trk...niversal+dividing+head&_sacat=12576&_from=R40


Here are a couple that stood out to me but you'd have to find/come up with your own gears:

http://www.ebay.com/itm/WM-CARROLL-...6?pt=BI_Tool_Work_Holding&hash=item3cd96446c2

http://www.ebay.com/itm/L-W-10-Univ...447?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&hash=item3a4dbc883f

You can always rig up your own system like the other guys have mentioned.

-Ron
 
This was just done in a recent issue of Machinist Workshop or Home Shop Machinist. Author of the article was doing it on some Triumph 650cc rocker arm shafts. It looked great and now I want to have that done on my Triumph shafts. Let me know if you do it. I'd be interested in someone doing it for me. The article was called " A temporary 4th axis on the mill" I was literally with in the past 2 issues of one of those publications. I'll do some digging around to see if I can still find it.
 
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