Buoyed by my small successes with the worm and wheel yesterday I decided to take the plunge and set up the mill to actually cut an involute gear.

I took Brian’s advice and did a test cut on a stub of aluminium to take the burrs off and bed in the cutter.

It has to be said I made some mistakes but it was a great learning opportunity and as a number of fellow members asked on the GOG online modellers meeting I recorded a video of the process. I recorded the whole thing which is about 12 minutes long and I suspect may be a little boring in the middle where I was just repeating the cuts.

Here’s a list of the things I did wrong/didn’t do that I should have etc.

1. I didn’t fully tighten the locking collar when I refitted the 3D printed division plate which mean that after a few cuts it stopped moving and I lost my index position.

2. Although I checked some of the index pin holes in the division plate, I didn’t check them all and that came back to bite me as I struggled to get the pin in some of the holes properly this didn’t really affect the indexing too much but it did make it really hard to get the pin out between cuts

3. I forgot to lock the Y axis of the mill table which meant that the cutter eventually pushed away from the workpiece a little.

Taking all that into account I did manage to cut a gear (ish)

The other ‘side’ isn’t quite so pretty…

​Here is the video for those who are interested in the how.