Yeah, I'm still a bit confused-- Im no Tom Lipton but I think I got it figured out... He made a hand wheel to act as a drive on x, so you get lateral movement-- its also coupled to the dividing head itself so you get the rotation on the round stock that's chucked up into the dividing head. (This is what the cutter is engaging with.) So, the hand cranking feeds the round stock in and takes your plunge cut (say like IDK, 50 thou DOC). It rotates around so you get your torsional motion from You adjust the arms on the dividing head, and that advances by whatever it's set to. (So you end up basically getting lateral movement, if your cutter is 1/2", you basically end up setting your dividing head ratios to advance, say, by 450 thou). You keep moving laterally until you've basically slotted out what you want. Then you use your knee as you normally would and advance the depth of cut. The magic is in how the hand drive is coupled to the change-gears in the back. I can't figure that shit out. Someone smarter than me will have to have a go.

He is using a universal dividing head, they are quite expensive. Basically it is a conventional dividing head, except it has two shafts coming out the back. The long shaft (closest to the operator and visible in the video), couples to the shaft the dividing plate rides on. The short shaft is an extension of the spindle (not visible in the video). You can put a gear train between the two shafts for doing differential indexing (google it up, it is a bit complicated). The long shaft can also be coupled to the x-axis as shown in the video. The gear train is just used to give the desired pitch of the groove. Say you want to cut a .6 inch pitch groove. The lead screw moves the table .2" per revolution of the lead screw. The dividing head is 40:1 (40turns of the input shaft for 1 turn of the chuck). So the lead screw has to turn 3 full turns for every 40 turns of the input shaft. Most folks with a set up like this have a spreadsheet or table that will tell you what gears to use to get this ratio. But a 120 tooth gear driving a 30/60 driving a 15 will get you there

when I did my fitting machining trade course we did use the dividing head and horizontal mill to manual cut the same way it is not a forgotten skill and is still taught it helps later on with cnc machining

Manuel Contreras the hall set up is shown nice job and good comment

You're mostly right. But I do know of one cnc guy who is also old school like us. He's a rare beast.

jalil ur rehman h

Oou

Iyf

hahahaha... yeah, CNC does puts this apparatus to shame, I guess that's how the old timers did back then. I don't even know how to use a manual dividing head but can program helical milling in less time than it took to position his endmill to the workpiece lol

+anonymousVSnwo .... noone said anything about cnc....this gut moves like a snail

That would be interesting. Can you show how you do it please? I haven't had a need to do CNC because most of my work has been single repairs or fabrication to match a replacement part.

Matt Dostou b