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A chance encounter led to a lady explaining that she was learning about cutting Gemstones to support her grandson's interest in this new hobby.
She was having trouble with her machine that positions the gemstone when it is brought into contact with the diamond grinding wheel.
This machine allows you to cut facets on the gemstone, but her machine only had an indexing wheel for holding the gemstone in 64 different ways.
The Club she belongs to said she needed an index wheel for her older style grinder with 96 postions.
I said I could make one for her and she thought that would be helpful as spare parts are not readily available.
She let me borrow her 64 position index wheel and the positioning machine and I took it to the shop, measured dimensions of the wheel
and the shaft where the wheel mounts
I also measured the shape of the grooves on the existing wheel.
The new index wheel needed to be the same overall size as the original but needed to have 96 grooves on its perimeter
This meant the teeth had to be much more closely closely spaced on the rim of the wheel.
I measured up the grooves in the sample wheel and ground a single point cutter to make the same shaped groove.
But when I cut some grooves in the prototype wheel, the teeth looked too flimsy. You can see they are looking very fragile.
as the
I started by making a copy of the index wheel in aluminium on the lathe and made a single point cutter that could spin around in the vertical spindle and nibble the grooves as the mill table moved past.
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