Spindex Mods and Attachment

[rossbotics]

I was in the shop browsing the web a few weeks ago looking at one of those cheap made chineez Spindexes and thinking one of those would come in handy for quick little setups once in a while plus there dirt cheap, about that time the wife came in and sat with me and asked what was I looking at, so I told her what it was and what it was for, well the next thing you know it’s Christmas morning and low and be hold Santa Clause came down the chimney and put one under the Christmas Tree, (whata wife)

It looks really nice but the best thing is the spindle fits the bore of the housing within tenths! I must have gotten a good one (well almost) so just for kicks and giggles I took it apart just to see how accurately it was made, I put it on the surface plate and checked the parallelism of the spindle with its base and it was high on one end .007” so I sat it up and reground the base, it’s now within .0003”, next I checked both faces of the housing to see if they were square with the bore, they were both out .004” so back to the grinder I went, they’re now within .0003”, so while I had it all apart I thought I would machine and grind all four edges of the base beings they were not machined just painted, I thought this would make it easy to line the fixture up against a stop or a rail on the mill or surface grinder, I also tapped four 1/4-20 holes one in each corner just for the heck of it, I milled two 9/16” slots in the sides of the base for T-Nuts and drilled and reamed to 5/8” dowel pin holes in line with the spindles axis for locating the fixture in the T-Slots on the mill table, this way the spindle is in line with the machines axis, you can see in photos 1 & 2 what I did, (this complete ordeal took all day)

After I got all that taken care of I was thinking a Tail Stock would be a really cool addition for this thing, especially when you working with something long that has to be supported on the opposite end of the Spindex, to give an example you could cut a gear that’s made directly onto a shaft, you could cut splins and gears, you could drill holes that has to be precisely indexed plus machine squares, hexes, octagonals Etc. this would really extend the Spindexes capabilities, so I sat the Spindex on the surface plate and established the center height of the spindle, I then came up with a design that I thought was pretty straight forward and simple, it has a slotted base for bolting down on the mill table with a hardened spindle that’s threaded for adjustments plus a spindle locking lever on the side, the spindle is made from 4140 Pre-Hard Steel with a 60° point, that point was then fully hardened, the rest of the tool was fabricated from pre-ground 1018 Steel and brass, its assembled with dowel pins and socket head cap screws, after all the work put into both pieces I got a pretty nice little setup, I have included some photos of the modifications to the Spindex and photos of machining the Tail Stock

As always thanks for looking and happy machining

Doug

[Frank S]

Yep what a wife indeed, I would have had to have made sure she wasn't looking if mine bought me one of those and I had immediately taken it apart to check it for dimensional accuracy let alone start grinding or milling in mods. Your tail stock is a great addition many a time I had thought about something like that myself

[UncleBob]

Hello Doug,
I tried to save this one to my "Gotta Make It" file via the Save Button in your write-up. Somehow, the "button" tried to pick up your entire text, not just the title and subsequently rejected the Save: "'description' is too long. The max length is 500 characters while your value is 701 characters". Is this something that you can fix or does someone else need to be involved? (I'm pretty new here.)
Thanks,
Uncle Bob

[metric_taper]

I had to slip in a .003" piece of brass shim stock to stop the spindle from rocking when using it on the surface grinder. That one was 20 years ago. I purchased one last year that was better, but still not as tight as yours.
You got very lucky. Is there a manufacture name and tool supplier that your wife got this from? A link would be very nice.

[suther51]

Wonderfull set up. I could see milling hexes on the dumb end of some drill bits I have. I seem to remember the mill in the pictures is a hf mill is that correct? Been looking at them. Also been looking at a stinel sv4 mill. Would like the German made one but the time may not be right. Thanks
Eric

[tonyfoale]

Doug,

Those mods make a big difference the cheap spindexers. I did very similar for my T&C grinder. I did consider making a tail stock but so far I have not had need for one.

There is one extra modification that I did to mine. As they come it is very hard to remove all endfloat and still have a smooth rotation so I decided to keep it loaded with a spring. I didn't have one of the right size and I used a bunch of O-rings instead. Lack of endfloat was critical for my main application and this fixed it perfectly. Details are shown in a previous post http://www.homemadetools.net/forum/h...6205#post83248

I also had a need for smooth low friction combined longitudinal and rotational motion and so I converted it to work as an air bearing when needed. This is only of use in specific applications.

[rossbotics]

Yep what a wife indeed, I would have had to have made sure she wasn't looking if mine bought me one of those and I had immediately taken it apart to check it for dimensional accuracy let alone start grinding or milling in mods. Your tail stock is a great addition many a time I had thought about something like that myself

Thanks Frank
The wife hadn't any idea what I was doing that day, if she had seen me doing those things she would have asked if it was no good? , she's pretty sharp though, she understands our language terminology pretty darn good.

thanks again
Doug

[Frank S]

Thanks Frank
The wife hadn't any idead what I was doing that day, if she had seen me doing those things she would have asked if it was no good? , she's pretty sharp though, she understands our language terminology pretty darn good.

thanks again
Doug

Mine too; I think that is why she doesn't buy me things like that because she knows most things that can be bought in our budget range is never going to suit me so rather than buy me something she already knows that I'm going to cut up grind up weld up or otherwise transform into something entirely different she will tell me to buy what I want and contribute some of her money for the item. That way what ever I do to the item is on my head

[PJs]

Really enjoyed the Great write up, and build Doug! There are a ton of these mods out there but none done to your quality and fully built add-on tailstock. The thing i really like is; for a days'+ of work you can make a cheap n' cheerful item like this into a precision instrument that will serve more purposes and a long time!

Thanks for sharing your take on this and Kudo's to your wife for her inspiring you to take it to your level!

PJ

[rossbotics]

Hi Bob
Thanks for your interest in the tool, you should be able to left click your mouse and drag the cursor I across all the text, this will turn the text blue, then right click anywhere on the blue text then left click and select copy, then right click and paste it into any word editor, notepad, whatever program you have on your computer.
Let me know if this helps

Doug