Knurling Help

The bump style knurlers usually have a place for normal toolholder on the opposite end, so they are good for that! Hah hah
 
I love Toms Techniques, and OxToolCo also has a great video for beginning knurlers.
 
I knurl a lot of aluminum, mostly 1/2". The tool should be 90 degrees to the work. Speed isn't critical but slow is fine. You can hand or auto feed very slowly. The piece of info that hasn't surfaced here, though, in case you weren't aware (I wasn't until I thought about it) - Knurling is like two gears meshing (the knurl wheel or wheels and the work) - and that meshing can only happen when the work is at one of the precise diameters that matches the knurling wheels' pitch. You can't just knurl any diameter! There are tables and the math isn't that hard to do. If you don't know the pitch of your knurling wheels just roll the tool along a piece of paper for a few inches and count the lines, do the math. (I built a little excel sheet so I could figure the right diameters for different pitch wheels.) To test - touch the knurl tool to the work very lightly. Rotate the lathe by hand a little over one revolution. If the knurl lines on the work line up with themselves as they come around, the diameter is correct. If you get a new set of lines - it isn't.
 
Greg, would you be so kind and put your eXcel work into photobucket and give us a link to see it .
I've been trying to understand what the relationship is of the code numbers on the knurling wheels s wrt work diameters and actual pitch of the teeth . Your hard work may be of a big help to many folk .

Dave
 
FYI - Little Machine Shop's table threw me off - turned out my knurl wheels didn't match the pitches they had told me - I think they have corrected that now. But I ended up measuring my wheels.

I wasn't successful at loading the file to this site, so I put it here: http://blowsmeaway.com/misc/Knurl-diameter-calculator.xlsx

If the diameter you're trying to approximate is in Column A (row 5 in this example) and the pitch in LPI is in Column B, then the closest proper knurling diameter can be calculated with this formula:

=ROUND(INT(A5*B5*PI())/B5/PI(),3)
 
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