Indexing plate vs dividing head

I see on eBay, a dividing head with a 5 inch chuck and tail stock for $320 and free shipping from China ( to the US). I wonder if they ship internationally to other countries and what it costs.
 
Still a lot of money in my currency. Do you have a link to that perhaps. I've never used ebay before and don't know what to look out for safety wise. I don't want to loose my money if you know what I mean. How do I find out if they ship internationaly?
 
Go to eBay.com and do a search for dividing head and see what comes up. It would be interesting to see what kind of shipping charges are to your country.
Look for a vendor that ships internationally.
I would be very careful about ordering internationally. Check everything carefully.
 
Bob Korves said:
An indexing 'head' (you said plate-?) often called a (super) spacer, divides 360 degrees into common and equal divisions (2, 3, 4, 6, 8, 12, 16, 24 might be common). Those are the only choices you get. It will make those divisions quickly and hold them rigidly. They are often used for production work, but can certainly be used for one off jobs. You will need the masking plates to be able to avoid indexing where you do not want to go.

A dividing head is used mostly for making larger numbers of divisions on things like gears, sprockets, and such, and quite accurately. In general, the setups are not as rigid and take more time to prepare, but there are exceptions. They are fairly slow to set up, but can be relatively quick to change out parts. It is possible to set a dividing head up for just doing one interval, but I would be looking for another way to get there.

Neither of those options is very useful for laying out single odd angles, like 139 degrees. A rotary table does that job much more quickly and easily. Note that there exist rotary tables with included or optional dividing plates, which can do a lot of useful things in a home shop, but are not so great for most production work unless you are clever and make quick change work setups for swapping out parts.
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It is possible to do quite exacting angular work with a dividing head; with the Brown & Sharpe, there is a special "angular indexing dividing plate", of which I have one, but have not needed to use, so far.
 
Since my last reply, I made a shaft to fit a 3" chuck that I had, to fit an 1 1/8" 5C collet. I needed to drill & tap the edge of a ring with 6 equally spaced holes. Worked fine. If something sticks out of the chuck very far it would need a tail stock support. Did you look at the modification to a spin indexer that Ox tool had on YouTube?
 
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