Well, I spent most of the day twiddling the handles on the rotary table
Tried various types of hand wheels for the valve, and some worked better than others. I didn't want to turn huge amounts of brass into swarf, so started with some disks parted/hacksawed off from a 1-1/4" bar, drilled 3/8" with a bit of cleaned 3/8" bar as a hub:
These were silver-soldered together (which I'm getting the hang of, I'm glad to say):
which gave me my starting material:
The solder joints are totally invisible on the final parts. This technique seemed to work well.
The basic procedure was some turning on the lathe on both sides of the part, cleaning up both the face and the hub of the exposed end, and doing whatever profiling on that face is required for the style of wheel. The hub was taken down to a diameter that I could hold in a collet later. For some, that required the pointy tool:
and for my third wheel style, which has a deep groove in the underside, a creatively-ground tool
I then flipped the part around in the chuck; gripping the newly machined hub ensured good alignment.
Two wheels turned, with different rim styles:
I did a third blank with a more domed shape, here on the left:
After that came a lot of work on the rotary table, counting revolutions of the handle and trying not to screw up
The first handle had 6 holes drilled:
and then some edge sculpting with a 1/8" end mill:
I worked out the angles with respect to each 60? segment. So, for example, started at 0?, half of a projection was maybe 12? (with the same on the other end of the segment), leaving 36? of indentation. So we start by cranking the rotary table 12?, bring in the end mill, crank 36?, back out the end mill, then crank 24?, mill for 36? etc.
The domed wheel was turned with a deep groove on the underside, so milling slots would break through:
and again the edge was sculpted:
The third wheel had three spokes, so the end mill was plunged, crank for some fraction of 120? (accounting for spoke thickness and mill diameter), raise the mill, crank some more, plunge the mill etc. I also sculpted the edge of this one:
Here are the results:
I'm not super happy with any of them, but it was fun to make them!
The original wheel I wanted to form with three thin spokes. Alas, I had a brain fart when computing how much to crank on each plunge, and made a segment that was too big. I used the rest for spoke practice:
I made another blank to have a second try at spokes. This one was more successful:
but the spokes ended up too skinny
Here you can see my notebook with my attempts at trig, and jottings for angles and hand wheel turns:
Maybe I can rescue the rim of that last one, and just solder in some spokes?
Now, I think I want to make something that doesn't involve fiddly bits of brass
Simo