White House K10 - a story of regeneration

[Ninemeister_imp]

It's a fairly random update tonight, essentially part of making things look "right" rather than just made. What can I say, I'm an engineer, so just humour me...

New custom rear sprocket is on order, so whilst the cat's away it was time to play with the mouse: the sprocket spacer.

As arrived it was simply a solid round billet with 6 holes. Functional, but not elegant with a lot of material doing very little. After drawing up the profile of the drive hub in CAD (the easy bit), whilst it would have been easy to send the part to a CNC machine shop to be profiled, after turning the inside away on the lathe and debating it in my head for a while, I had a go at machining the profile by hand using a rotary table on my mini-miller. Never done anything like this before so it was an experience if nothing else.

Lots of head scratching later, in the end making the fixtures took longer than the actual milling. I roughed it out by eye first, then used the DRO to position cuts after setting the angle on the rotary table, indexing 60 degrees for each set.
OK, it's not great and the finished part won't win any machining prizes, but I was quite pleased with my effort and it has given me the confidence to machine lightening slots into the front disc bells. One thing for sure was that the shavings weighed more than the finished part which came in at a svelte 155g.

Don't worry, I'm only using this temporarily and I'll have a pro machine shop make me another one, anodised gold to match the sprocket.