The misadventures of a Wells-Index 860C

[ScrapMetal]

Finally amassed enough tooling (well, almost but therein lies a story...), vises, and fixtures to finish up the broken fishing rod project.



I actually glued the old plastic piece back together so that I could take better measurements of it. Gluing wasn't a viable repair option though as this piece acts as a "clamp" to hold the reel on to the rod.




From the pictures, can you see how the one side of the "clamp" has a concave radius to it? Here's where the "story" comes in to play...

I have been dragging my feet on this a bit as I knew I had to have a way to cut the radius on the underside of this piece. I was really hoping to come across a good deal on a rotary table but that hasn't happened yet. I thought about using the horizontal drive on the W-I with an old boring head that I picked up but I still don't have the boring bars I'd need. What to do? What to do?

Then it came to me, "Any tool can be the right tool! - Red Green" (google "Red Green" you'll figure it out. ), my Kurt vise has a swivel base! What I did was to find the "center" of where the vise pivots then position the work piece the proper distance from that point to give me the radius I was looking for. I lined up the piece with an end mill mounted in the quill, loosened up the two nuts holding the vise in position on the swivel base, and slowly fed the piece in to the end mill while moving the "tail" of the vise side-to-side thus cutting an arc. In a nutshell, I used the vise as a rotary table.

It's not a high-precision piece or anything but I think it will do the job.

-Ron