We don't have snow here, but I hear you, one day 85 degrees, 55 the next day! In my opinion, if the goal is making gears for a clock or anything else, a dividing head is the necessary tool; a rotary table could be used as well if it had a dividing attachment, that is the table would have a worm drive and dividing plates as does a true dividing head; as I previously noted, an indexer has generally only one indexing plate, and is limited to a small number of divisions, perhaps 24 in most of them.