I finally finished making all the drawings for the clock. I also drew up plans for a depthing tool and a mainspring winder in Fusion and made drawings for those.
There were 53 drawings in all! It’s unfortunate that the free version of Fusion won’t let you have multiple sheets in a drawing, that made it a little more cumbersome, but I managed. And I printed them out for use in the shop.
Here you can see all the drawings, my other reference material (the original book from John Wilding, another book on clock making and one on making gears for clocks), and my bill-of-material spreadsheet.
Interestingly, clock gears are a bit different from your standard involute tooth profile. In clock making they tend to use a cycloidal tooth profile for the gears, which apparently leads to better efficiency. So, I got a book that describes how to make cycloidal gear cutters. John Wilding assumes you’re using a commercial gear cutter, but the only cycloidal cutters I could find were in Europe and were QUITE expensive. Plus, I wanted to make my own gear cutters anyway. Thus this book.
So today, I set out to make some swarf!
I have decided to make the required tools first, starting with the Depthing Tool. This seemed like a fairly simple place to start. This depthing tool is loosely based on the one John Wilding describes in his book, but I took ideas from Clickspring and other folks to make it a little nicer. JW’s doesn’t have the adjusting screw. I wanted that, so I added it.
The first part I made was the base for the depthing tool. This was made from 1/4" x 3/4“ 1018 CRS bar. I started by drilling holes at the far ends of the slot, then used those holes to create a radius on the end of the bar (no photo). Then I milled a ¼” slot between those two holes.
Lastly, I centered the part in the 4-jaw chuck on the lathe and drilled and tapped a 5-40 hole. This will be for the adjusting screw (the part I added).
Here’s the completed base, sitting by the drawing of what the depthing tool should look like when completed.
Before moving on with other parts, I decided I needed to figure out what was going on with the tailstock of my lathe. As I was doing those last few steps in the lathe, it became obvious that the camlock lever on the tailstock wasn’t working. It just flopped around like a dead fish and never tightened up. I was able to lock the tailstock anyway because this lathe has a 1/2" socket in front of the tailstock that will also activate the cam lock. This is so you can use a 1/2" torque wrench when tightening the tailstock which apparently improves accuracy. I’ve never really used it. I have plenty of accuracy using the built-in cam lock lever. Until now when it stopped working. But the 1/2" socket still worked. Interestingly, the lathe also came with a lever that fit in that socket. So I just used that.
While it worked just fine, it was not very convenient. And I found myself continually yanking on the dead fish cam leaver behind the tailstock, which of course, did nothing. So I decided that my next move would be to see what was going on with the regular lever to see if I could fix it.
After consulting the manual for the the lathe, it seems that there is a roll pin that connects the rear lever to the front socket, which operates the cam. Armed with this knowledge, I was able to pull the lever out of the back of the tailstock to reveal the broken roll pin.
I had no idea how to get at that roll pin, but I decided to give it a go. So, I unscrewed the clamping foot from the bottom of the tailstock and laid the tailstock on its side (That puppy is stinking heavy!). Sure enough, they brilliantly left an opening for you access the roll pin. Very nice.
The manual said it was a 5mm x 30mm roll pin. I had a cheap box of roll pins from Harbor Freight. The only sad part was that they were not metric sized pins. They were inch based. So I just picked the closest one (a 7/32” x 1.25” roll pin) and judiciously squeezed it down in the vice a bit till it could start nicely in the hole. Then I ground a bit off one end till it was ~30mm long.
Then I worked on lining up lever hole with the socket hole and pounding the roll pin into place.
The most challenging part of this operation turned out to be trying to re-attach the clamping foot to the cam lock. That took a lot of tries. It was nearly impossible to get my hands in there to feel where the hole was so I could line the bolt up correctly. And of course, I had to do it with everything in place because the clamping foot was too wide to rotate between the sides of the bed. But eventually, with lots of tries, I got there. And now it works like a champ!
And I’m ready to continue on my way making parts! Yay!
But not today. That was it for me and the shop today. But I felt good about getting that taken care of!
Thanks for stopping by,
Kim
