Aftermarket Rotary Table

Ha! You should look up what USPS would charge you to sent it back to the UK. Especially if it weighs over 4 pounds.:(
 
Thanks for your reply, RCWorks. That work you show is at least a couple of orders of magnitude above my pay grade, but it's good to see what CAN be done with sufficient knowledge and skill. Did you make that on a horizontal mill or was it done vertically?

:frog:
 
wa5cab said:
Ha! You should look up what USPS would charge you to sent it back to the UK. Especially if it weighs over 4 pounds.:(
Click to expand...

The basic shape is off the lathe as in the hole in the center of the cone.

Then it's milling time...
The 4 inch chuck has to be centered on the rotary table, I do it with a 1 inch round turned in the lathe so I know it is round and I make sure the chuck it's centered by indicating on it... Then it's time to bring the work piece to the chuck and get it in and straight. That's when the rotary table comes in... Each hole is center drilled then drilled 60 degrees apart.

Not a hard part to make, It was just a test piece to see if I could do it, it looked like a challenge at the time. It was just me playing around to see what I could get out of a Harbor Freight 8x12 lathe and the Harbor Freight 44991 bench top mill. Neither is a first quality rig but that's where your knowledge of the machine takes over to make up for what it my lack. The Mill in this case is little more than a drill press with an R8 spindle and a cross slide, but with a little thought and experience it can deliver.

No DROs were used, I don't have one on either machine yet.
 
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Depending on what part you are making This could be a useful fixture . You can't really mill with it like you can with a rotab . I had one of these and the tail stock that went with it . The job was a tube that needed some holes and slots indexed around the diameter , it worked really well . And as you can see the tooling cost was modest .
http://www.ebay.com/itm/LIGHTLY-USE...9632e35&pid=100005&rk=2&rkt=6&sd=401083053610
 
Actually, for a horizontal mill you might be better off with a small dividing head. grizzly sells a nice little DH, the B &S -0, that fits my one slot Burke #4 table really well. Also has utility on larger mills, such as the Van Norman 12.
 
Atlas actually sold a horizontal indexer for the mill. Has a tailstock and the spindle is made like the one on the mill and on the 618 in that it has both a 2<T taper and a 1"-10 threaded nose. It uses 6" change gears for indexing.
 
And the Atlas indexer must be made of un-obtanium... or perhaps platinum or even gold.! Completely out of my range.
So the imports look pretty good to me!

Right now the BS-O seems the right size. And it'll take some doing to save enough pennies as I keep buying more "affordable" tooling...
It never ends.. does it!?!?! LOL..
 
Wa5cab, I tend to fall into the same category as 34_40... the original setup is nice, but the "collector's price" of that unit is more than I'm willing to "invest" at this time. :cold: I've seen the original in the pdf files of the catalogs that are posted here and and elsewhere and think the capability would be nice to have, but wonder whether I can justify the expenditure. o_O

:frog:
 
Well, you are probably right. I was lucky enough to get mine with the MFA I bought. I haven't actually looked at what any have sold for. But judging from the typical prices on the vise and the rotary table, I lucked out. I also lucked out on the vise as the seller was only asking about what a similar size new Chinese made one would have cost. Not cheap but not like what I paid for the original horizontal rotary table, either!
 
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