On 14 May 2005 23:04:56 -0400 DoN. wrote:
How many do you need?

Only the one initially.

And what other tools do you have?

In addition to the mill and lathe, I have a relatively substantial drill
press, but no shaper.

A CNC
mill isn't much help for this. A lathe could be used to emulate a
shaper, if the number of splines matches a sub-multiple of the number
of teeth on the bull gear, but it would be tedious.

The actual number of splines is not important, nor is the precise
profile of the splines. The purpose of this part is as an internal
ratchet, used for a gear shifter on a bicycle. The spline profiles must
be symmetrical as there are two pawls, one for each shifting direction
(the pawls are disengaged at rest).

I am intrigued by your suggestion of using a lathe, how might this work
exactly?

Does the number of splines matter? What about the shape? Your
image looks like square splines, but the most common ones are about
the shape of gear teeth. You might even be able to find internal
tooth gears.

I feel quite stupid that this never occured to me. I had come across
drive shaft coupling splines, but they tended to have too few splines
for my purposes.