cutting a worm on the minilathe
 

I have a Cummins 7x12 minilathe and a nicely hand-ground Acme profile tool
I made. Right, so I have to cut a worm at 6.4 tpi. the change gears
with my 16 tpi leadscrew will be:

(30/50) x (40/60)

Can SKS tell me how to set this up so the gears actually mesh? Do I have
to somehow interpose an idler in there somewhere?

Help!
Mike in BC

cutting a worm on the minilathe
 

On Feb 23, 2:20 pm, Michael Gray wrote:
I have a Cummins 7x12 minilathe and a nicely hand-ground Acme profile tool
I made. Right, so I have to cut a worm at 6.4 tpi. the change gears
with my 16 tpi leadscrew will be:

(30/50) x (40/60)

Can SKS tell me how to set this up so the gears actually mesh? Do I have
to somehow interpose an idler in there somewhere?

Help!
Mike in BC



Mike,
There are two adjustments. When you remove the cover, there is a nut
lower than the change gears.
Called an "adjuster" in this photo, (page 27 "Changing Gears") (PDF
page 29)
http://www.grizzly.com/images/manuals/g8688_m.pdf
That adjuster allows you to correctly set the engagement of the gears
"A" and "B"
There is a nut on the backside of the shaft holding gears "B" and "C",
that nut will allow you to set the clearance of gears "C" and "D".
Proper running clearance is one layer of thin paper. Set "C" and "D"
first.

I don't see that gear combination or pitch. So, like cutting metric
threads on any American leadscrew lathe, DON'T OPEN THE HALF NUT. You
will lose sync, (and have a ~1/27 chance of finding it again.) You
must stop the head, back the tool out, and reverse the rotation to
move back to the start.

Good luck,
Dave

cutting a worm on the minilathe
 

"Michael Gray" wrote in message
...
I have a Cummins 7x12 minilathe and a nicely hand-ground Acme profile tool
I made. Right, so I have to cut a worm at 6.4 tpi. the change gears
with my 16 tpi leadscrew will be:

(30/50) x (40/60)

Can SKS tell me how to set this up so the gears actually mesh? Do I have
to somehow interpose an idler in there somewhere?

Help!
Mike in BC

Generally speaking you need to couple the 50 and the 40 together so they
rotate in unison. Not sure how you do that on a mini lathe. A 24 and a 60 in
the gear train give you the same ratio ( but I see from the grizzly web page
that that the 7x12 does/may not have a 24 tooth gear).

Carl Boyd

cutting a worm on the minilathe
 

Carl Boyd wrote:
"Michael Gray" wrote in message
...

I have a Cummins 7x12 minilathe and a nicely hand-ground Acme profile tool
I made. Right, so I have to cut a worm at 6.4 tpi. the change gears
with my 16 tpi leadscrew will be:

(30/50) x (40/60)

Can SKS tell me how to set this up so the gears actually mesh? Do I have
to somehow interpose an idler in there somewhere?

Help!
Mike in BC


Generally speaking you need to couple the 50 and the 40 together so they
rotate in unison. Not sure how you do that on a mini lathe. A 24 and a 60 in
the gear train give you the same ratio ( but I see from the grizzly web page
that that the 7x12 does/may not have a 24 tooth gear).

Carl Boyd


If the gears do not have keys to lock them together with, degrease
them and stick a couple drops of superglue between them and press them
together. It'll pop apart with some persuasion from a sharp edge driven
between them, and acetone will clean the residue off.

Or you can just shoot a hole through them with a drill and tap it, and
drop a screw through, if you don't want to trust the superglue to hold up.

If you have to resort to idlers, use 2. First idler will change the
direction of feed, second to get it back into the direction it needs to
go. If there is not a leadscrew reverse on the lathe.

Cheers
Trevor Jones

cutting a worm on the minilathe
 

On Sat, 23 Feb 2008 22:20:22 +0000, Michael Gray wrote:

I have a Cummins 7x12 minilathe and a nicely hand-ground Acme profile tool
I made. Right, so I have to cut a worm at 6.4 tpi. the change gears with
my 16 tpi leadscrew will be:

Thanks to all for the helpful comments.
I've got it sorted now and found the following sites of help:

http://www.lathes.co.uk/latheparts/page14.html

I d/l NthreadsP.exe from lathes.co.uk and found it ran well by way of Wine
on my linux (Ubuntu) box.

http://www.gizmology.net/changegears.htm

http://www.littlemachineshop.com/Ref...ange_gears.php

http://www.varmintal.com/alath.htm#Cutting_Odd_Threads

http://www.mini-lathe.org.uk/thread_...ge_gears.shtml
good explanation of what you're trying to accomplish with your change
gears.

On some of these you can put in the data and a server programme will sort
out the change gears for you (very handy), some let you d/l a programme so
that you can "do it at home". I found that many of the programmes
wouldn't run under Wine on linux, but they probably would be very
comfortable under Windoze. Do check out NthreadP on the lathes.co.uk
site, quite nifty I'd say.

HTH,
Mike in BC