#26 - Gear Made on a 10" Atlas Lathe

This video is about making a gear on a lathe. The indexing holes on the bull-gear were worn out, and the looseness accumulated at the last tooth which became narrower than the rest of them. Luckily the extra cut of that tooth was not on the driven side, so it did not matter. The gear worked fine but a bit louder than the original plastic one. Eventually all plastic gears broke in the gearbox and they were changed to steel gears in time. The worst time break happened when working on a Rockwell mill, this will come later. Final indexing was done by welding a flat-bar into a sleeve and held by the end of the screw. A pin was attached to this bar which was forced between teeth by the extended part of the flat-bar (not shown) and pulled into the gears firmly by several bangy chords. I needed 30 teeth so every other gap of the indexing gear was used. The advantage of this locator system was that the chuck did not have to be held during the shaping operation. The shaping operation took over 5000 strokes and 2 days, resulting in a painful wrist. At that time I had no horizontal mill, this pre-WWII 10" Atlas Lathe had to do the job. I did this job once before in steel 60 years ago on my grandfather big old lathe.