Over on one of the forums that I frequent, it was suggested that I might add rifling to the barrel. Well not quite rifling in the barrel but perhaps equally mad.
From the photos of the real thing I note that the wheels have brass hubs. Nothing unusual there you might think but unlike most hubs etc which have hexagonal collars for tightening with a spanner these have octagonal heads. Now I have a hex collet block and a pin vice which at a pinch cut be brought into service but they would still only have six sides. Again I could have drawn them up and had them 3D printed then painted them with brass paint and job done.
However on one of my favourite machining YouTube channels the guy who does some amazing things uses a “5C Spin Indexer” For those that are not familiar “5C” is a type of collet. I don’t possess any 5C collets, so although I could make use of the functionality of a spin indexer the likelyhood of my buying one was very slim. Then some time ago I discovered that Arc Euro Trade the machinery omany that I bought my mill from stock a 5C spin indexer that has an ER32 collet adapter. Now I don’t have any ER32 collets either but I could see me getting more use from them as they are much more flexible in use than 5C collets. With 5C collets you pretty much have to have a separate collet for every size whereas ER collets usually have approximately 1mm range so a 10mm ER collet would Hold stock from 10mm diameter down to 9mm diameter so you need less collets to cater for a wide range of stock sizes.
Having said all that the 5C/ER32 spin indexers were still getting on for £200 so I couldn’t justify buying one. Then just after Guildex I got a sales email from Arc reducing them to just over £130 so having not spent up at Stafford I took the plunge. I still didn’t have an ER32 collets but my son bought me a set for my birthday.
To get it to mount on my mill table I had to mill a couple of slots to accommodate the width of the T slots but that done I was able to give it a test run yesterday. – The delay in getting to it was working out how I might hold it to actually cut the slots.
That done I gave it a test run on some 3mm brass rod. Unfortunately I hadn’t noticed the hole in the end which precluded me from using it for one of the hubs.
