Back in February after reading Chuck Fellows Dividing head thread I thought this would be a perfect tool for my buddy Brett. Brett makes a lot of my products, one of which is a 12 sided fixture used in the gunsmithing trade. Brett’s CNC machine is an 80’s vintage VMC and has no support for a 4th axis. After discussing it with him he also thought it would be worth looking into provided we could get the machine to do the indexing ( run unattended ). So the story begins….About this time Member Rodw started working on another version of code that was a bit more precise on the math. With a lot of help from Rod, I finally got an external proximity switch to trigger the index , so now everything works on the bench. Time to start making a “Proper” package.
Brett wanted to use a huge Cincinnati dividing head he had acquired, this is definitely industrial grade ! It has a 1 ½” through hole and is sporting an 8” 3 jaw chuck. We used a NEMA 34 motor with 640 oz in of torque to drive it. Brett made the stepper adapter and made a few minor modifications to the dividing head to get it all mounted.
To drive the stepper I ordered a Meanwell 48 volt 10 amp powersupply and used an old microstepping driver I had on hand from when I upgraded the motors and drivers on my Tormach 1100 mill. I also used a buck stepdown converter to get low voltage to drive the Arduino and prox switch. The drive electronics fit nicely into a project box. The Arduino will need to be by the machine control so it was put into its own box and connected to the main box with a Cat 5 cable. I milled a cover for the LCD button shield from a piece of 5/8” acrylic , mostly just to test my code for the complex pocketing, I was planning on re-doing it in aluminum , but it looked so cool I thought we should give it a try. The acrylic cuts really well if you use coolant and really sharp tools. It leaves a very “clear” finish. I did do a bit of polishing with some Novus plastic polish on the areas that the bottom of the endmill cut, the sides hardly needed any polishing at all. I made the button extensions from brass, these fit into counterbores in the cover. The prox switch is also connected to the main box with an RJ11 connector. I used an Amphenol connector for the stepper motor. This is the same connector that my Tormach uses for the 4th axis. I thought it might be nice to be able to swap indexers between our 2 machines. This really turned out nice and cut cycle time considerably as well as several setups from how they were previously made. So, many thanks to Chuck Fellows for starting me down this road and many thanks to Rodw for all his help !!
I will attach a bunch of pictures to this post and start editing some video for another post.
Scott
Brett wanted to use a huge Cincinnati dividing head he had acquired, this is definitely industrial grade ! It has a 1 ½” through hole and is sporting an 8” 3 jaw chuck. We used a NEMA 34 motor with 640 oz in of torque to drive it. Brett made the stepper adapter and made a few minor modifications to the dividing head to get it all mounted.
To drive the stepper I ordered a Meanwell 48 volt 10 amp powersupply and used an old microstepping driver I had on hand from when I upgraded the motors and drivers on my Tormach 1100 mill. I also used a buck stepdown converter to get low voltage to drive the Arduino and prox switch. The drive electronics fit nicely into a project box. The Arduino will need to be by the machine control so it was put into its own box and connected to the main box with a Cat 5 cable. I milled a cover for the LCD button shield from a piece of 5/8” acrylic , mostly just to test my code for the complex pocketing, I was planning on re-doing it in aluminum , but it looked so cool I thought we should give it a try. The acrylic cuts really well if you use coolant and really sharp tools. It leaves a very “clear” finish. I did do a bit of polishing with some Novus plastic polish on the areas that the bottom of the endmill cut, the sides hardly needed any polishing at all. I made the button extensions from brass, these fit into counterbores in the cover. The prox switch is also connected to the main box with an RJ11 connector. I used an Amphenol connector for the stepper motor. This is the same connector that my Tormach uses for the 4th axis. I thought it might be nice to be able to swap indexers between our 2 machines. This really turned out nice and cut cycle time considerably as well as several setups from how they were previously made. So, many thanks to Chuck Fellows for starting me down this road and many thanks to Rodw for all his help !!
I will attach a bunch of pictures to this post and start editing some video for another post.
Scott
Last edited:
so I posted it all.
