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Wooden candlesticks for Christmas???

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John Hill
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Wooden candlesticks for Christmas???

#1 Post by John Hill » Sun Nov 29, 2015 4:23 am

I was playing in my shed today*....

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I built this contraption on my milling machine, an assortment of gears mounted on the end of the mill table to couple the movement of the mill table to a rotary table which is mounted with the axis horizontal. The mill feed screw has a 5mm pitch and for example with 1:1 coupling I am able to mill a helix with a 5mm pitch, right now I have set it up ratio of 20:65 for a 16.25mm pitch. I have allowed for compound gearing to get widely different ratios for particular jobs. The gears are 'borrowed' from my Drummond lathe and there is quite a selection of them to choose from. There are a lot of gears in use but three of them are idlers where a single idler would have been enough but I do not have any near the required size, there must be an odd number of idlers for a right hand thread. Working out the design to mount so many idlers was the major challenge of this project.

In action...
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... the mill power feed can drive the action or I can use the handle which will be necessary for any larger diameter work as there is a minimum speed that the power feed has sufficient torque.


The end result...
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As you can see this is in wood but it should work equally well in plastic or metals.

There are a number of things that could be better, I need to make spacers to have the gears align properly and I really should have machined that raw painted end off the vertical bracket!

*It took much more than a day to make all the bits!!!
Been in data comm since we formed the bits individually with a Morse key.

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probes
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Re: Wooden candlesticks for Christmas???

#2 Post by probes » Sun Nov 29, 2015 8:33 am

Wow! :ymapplause:
Now, next - a pic of the candlelight dinner! :ymsmug:

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