Dividing head identification help

If it was war time production, it could be made by anyone (Sterling, Rolls Royce, you know) and not been stamped with a maker's name.
 
If it was war time production, it could be made by anyone (Sterling, Rolls Royce, you know) and not been stamped with a maker's name.

It's strikes me as having been made way back when grandad was a boy, but the fasteners are definitely metric... A puzzle, for sure! I'm just curious to know a bit about it, it's so nicely made.

I have the 3 and 4 plates, which give 41,31,21,13 and 43,33,23,20 holes.

The gear cutting is really purely for my own amusement, but differential dividing does look quite useful for expanding what's indexable beyond making more and more plates.

Next challenge is to get the chuck off so I can give everything a good clean up and lube. There are pin spanner holes in the spindle right behind the chuck, so I assume it's threaded and they're for holding the spindle.
 
No closer to finding any more about it, but I have used it a bunch:

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I'd like to get plates 1 and 2 to fill some of the gaps in what I can index. Looks like I might have to make them or adapt some that are roughly the right size.
 
Wow, dude is making gears.

I’ve wondered if a person wanted some plates made, and knew someone with a dro on their mill, or someone who had a cnc mill, if those plates could be produced by that someone. Not much different than making a bolt circle, is it?
 
Enjoying making gears too :)

Absolutely! MrPete has some great videos on making plates using various different methods; DRO being one of them. A DRO is on my shopping list! The other option open to me is to 3D print some temporary plates which will allow me to index for the plates I want to make in steel. For oddball prime number indexing operations that you might only use once or twice, I reckon the 3D print method is a winner anyway. I have the differential dividing option too, so as long as I can index for the gears I need to index a plate I want to make... Its possibly the worst case of tools breeding tools I've ever seen!! :grin big:
 
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Oh man. The slicer (Cura) really doesn't like slicing a part with hundreds of tiny holes in it... The longest slicing time I've ever had on a part!


Plate CAD.PNG Plate Cura.PNG

An 8 hour print. I'll set the printer going tomorrow to churn it out.

It turns out that 17,27,37,47, 19,29,39,49 hole plates compliment what I've got the best (my indexing calculator came in really handy for this), so that's what I've gone with. They make pretty patterns too! The plates on this head are 10mm thick and double sided, so I've got the 9's on one side the 7's on the other. Using PLA+, will update on how well it turns out.
 
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