Home Made Quick Change Gearbox

[DICKEYBIRD]

Oh stop your groaning when you see what it is. It WILL be in a box when I get the nice hinged wooden box lid finished and it is most definitely quicker than fumbling around with all those gears in situ on the lathe.



It's just a dummy steel stub shaft turned to match the OD of the change gear mount bracket hub and the ID of the leadscrew drive gear bushing mounted solidly to a nice piece of wood. I added a piece of sheet metal to protect the wood and 5 dowels to hold the extra gears. The dowel on the right is there for whenever I get around to buying a 127/120 gear pair for metric threads.

To use it, you slip the gear carrier down over the stub, place your gears on in the desired order, roll a piece of paper between the first pair of gears, tighten the shaft nut and repeat with the other.





When you have everything set up properly, you pick up the whole stack and carefully put it back in place, set the clearance between the 1st gear and the spindle with a piece of paper and tighten the pinch bolt.



It saves bunch of agony, for me anyway. Next, I plan to put together a bunch of the most common threading combinations, take a picture of each, label them with the gear tooth numbers/locations and put them into a 3-ring binder for quick reference. That's about the closest I'll ever come to a real QC gearbox.

[Bill Pace]

Well..... you clever devil!!

[dockrat]

Now thats thinking OUTSIDE the box lol....brilliant!

[DICKEYBIRD]

Thanks Bill and d/r, I knew if I kept posting things today, somebody would like one of 'em.

By the way Bill, thanks for the Supergrit tip, I bought some zirconia and AO discs for my disc sander from them last week They were a good deal, no hassles and arrived quickly. Those zirconia discs are awesome. They make quick work out of anything you throw at 'em! Now I want one of those skinny belt jobbies that the knife guys use. I saw a really cool one made from pipe fittings over at SFT today.

[Black_Moons]

Very nice little setup. If you ever wanted a full quick change, Consider looking into 'electronic leadscrews'
Iv considered making a basic one for my lathe if just for easily adjustable feed rates (my lathe had QCGB for the feed, but to go from 'fine' to 'corse' feeds requires you swap two gears around on the side of the lathe, so without doing that I only have a 1:4 range of feeds (my corses is only 4 faster then finest), but id get 1:16 after swaping the gears around.

[mcskipper]

Very nice set-up!

I'd be happy just to know how the gears go in.

[gwilson]

Glad you found the zirconia abrasive more effective. I've wasted my time trying to convince some knotheads on another forum that they cut better.

[Ken_Shea]

Nice for sure, makes you wonder why you didn't think of it sooner doesn't it?

[Teenage_Machinist]

That falls into the category of "awesome as hell"

Now all you need is a whole bunch of gear carrier units...

I need to make one.

[J Tiers]

You know .... that's a really good idea.

Put a flip cover on it with the full change gear table on it plus your quick setup pics, and you'd have a heck of a clever deal.

In fact, find some extra gears, and leave a couple or three of them set up for your most common needs, and you're REALLY going.