My first gear cutting adventure...

@stioc - Thinking about my pin suggestion last night (instead of sleeping, 'cause that's what I do), I realized that you would need a modified pin that allowed you to shift the holes by half the pitch between holes not the diameter. So it is probably still do-able, but definitely not just "reduce the pin diameter by half"
 
I just very recently got an 8" RT, set of indexing plates and a tail stock. I intend to make more gears than what my spin indexer allows. My first attempt at gears was duplicating one of the change gears on my lathe. 30 teeth, hub & keyway. I hand ground a cutter to use in a fly cutter by eyeballing an existing gear. Broached the keyway with a sharpened pc of key stock on the lathe. Made an arbore for a 5C collet to drill blank size & whittled away.
I put the finished gear on the lathe to test run. Worked fine but I don't know how long an aluminum gear would last. It was just an experiment to see if I could pull it off. Didn't want to take the time to do it in steel.
Next thing I want to try is making a splined shaft and matching gear to slide on the shaft. I haven't figured out how to broach the gear yet. More YouTube university time needed. If all else fails I'll try to do it on the mill using the RT indexing and moving the mill table in X&Z, spindle locked.
 
@Larry42 that's pretty neat. I think most of us start out wanting to make a usable gear for our lathes. I think the aluminum gear will last a while since people are using 3D printed plastic gears pretty successfully.
 
I finally got around to cutting the full profile on the gear I started with. Now I'm wondering to cut the 9x20 change gears which I'm pretty sure are M1 do I need 20deg or 14.5deg cutters. I'll have to take a closer look at the gears but I'm guessing they're 20deg (more pointy)?

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