New / Old universal dividing head

[Pete O]

I had a nice little win on this one this afternoon, the bloke who I bought it from messaged me saying he had found the centre for it if I wanted to come by and pick it up. I thought that's nice, it takes a 3mt centre and would be handy to have.
I swung past on my way to work tonight and what he actually had was the tailstock for this dividing head.
Much better find than a 3mt centre would have been.
I did manage to get the chuck plate off it the other day, some gentle application of th propane torch around the hub and it came off pretty easily. There's a keyway that locates the direct-dividing plate behind the chuck, the key was missing from this and I suspect that had allowed the chuck to get over-tightened on the spindle. Now I can flip it around to swap between the 16-slot and 36-slot sides of the direct-dividing plate, nice and easy to make a hex etc off the 36-slot side.

[Mayhem]

Glad to hear he found the tailstock.

[Dr Stan]

(06-20-2016, 05:17 AM)Mayhem Wrote: Glad to hear he found the tailstock.

Sure saves 1) building one; 2) shimming the index head or a different brand of tailstock.

[theworkshopmechanic]

Hi there
How did you go with the dividing head?
I recently bought the same one.
I’d be interested to know what plate you have on yours.

Cheers

[theworkshopmechanic]

My location is Sydney Australia

[Vinny]

Welcome to the forum!!!

[Pete O]

(08-11-2018, 05:46 PM)theworkshopmechanic Wrote: Hi there
How did you go with the dividing head?
I recently bought the same one.
I’d be interested to know what plate you have on yours.

Cheers

Hi and welcome to the forum; I've just got home after a couple of weeks away so just reading your post. The Paradisi seems to me to be a very nice piece of kit, I'll have to have a look and see what the hole ranges are on the plate. I picked up a copy of the original user manual which has charts for all the compound indexing gearing for every division between 1 and 400, plus the spiral cutting charts etc. I could send you a copy if you don't have them. Do you have the gear train components? Mine had none of the gears nor the banjo, I have cast a banjo and made the gear spindles but have not yet found time to make any of the gears, other projects keep pushing it down the list. If you have the gears I'd be interested to know what pitch the originals are, I bought a couple of 14DP involute cutters for the task and have been keeping an eye out for the rest of the set.

[Pete O]

A couple of photos showing the hole ranges on the two dividing plates.
   
   

[Pete O]

It's only taken five and a half years but today I got the gear train for the Paradisi head finished! It needed something to push it up the priority list after languishing in a corner all this time; I need to cut a metric thread thus need a 127-tooth gear for the lathe thus finally had a need to get the universal dividing head operational.
I picked up a set of gears in 20dp, really a shade small for the job (I suspect the originals were probably somewhere around 16dp) but they will do the job. Had to bore the gears 22mm and cut 6mm internal keyways in them all on the shaper, make the retaining nuts (made 3 imitations of the 1 original that came with the head), I made the spindle extension shaft a couple of years ago but finally today put a keyway in it and cut some flats to fit the 1" ring / open-ender that I use for the mill table lock.
Here it is all set up to cut 127 divisions.
   
   
and the rest of the gears
   

Going to have to make a riser for it to be able to cut the 127-tooth 12dp gear for the lathe though, the centre height of this dividing head is not high enough to take the 10.75" diameter of the blank.

Also, if I ever want to cut helicals I will have to come up with some kind of secondary drive setup, the spindle on the mill table where drive is taken off is a different diameter to the shafts on the dividing head, 1" vs 22mm. That's something for Future Pete to worry about.