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My last three attempts at wheel cutting have been a steep learning curve. Not centring the cutter, not tightening the wheel, cutter not sharp enough….. A friend over on the Madmodder Forums offered to lend me a hand and so I visited his workshop and managed to make a multi-tooth cutter and cut a wheel. Here are the pics… The method we used I first read on an article by David Creed on making a multi-tooth cutter and also on Deans excellent website: http://www.deansphotographica.com/machining/projects/multipoint/multipoint.html

We have basically followed the instructions and ideas on there but here are the mandatory pictures!

This first one in my opinion was the most impressive. When calculating the tooth arc, we had to make a tool to profile the cutter to represent this arc. I had read that the easiest way of doing this would be to grind the end of a suitably sized drill bit as I have done and shown in an earlier log. Stew came up with an excellent idea of using a magnified projection of the tool to determine the correct size and profile. As you can see from the photo, Stew set up a torch, magnifying glass with the tool inbetween. This allowed us to project the profile onto some CAD drawings of the correct circle diameters. It worked very well and it was supprising how accurate this allowed us to be.

This shows the profiling tool ground to size and shape….. as you can see, it was in use at the time of the photo and hence all the swarf!

Here are all the arbours and jigs made by Stew…..and taken home by me…. THANKS I owe you one!

Another picture of the jig for drilling the 4 holes in the wheel blank….

Cutting the profile of each cutter side…

Cutting away the spare material of the cutter on the other jig…

The cutter straight off the mill…finally made!

And now time to harden! Cherry red and was knocked in a bucket of water:

The cutter mounted on the arbour and starting to cut the wheel. The wheel was mounted on my CNC divider which seemed to work quite nicely.

And the final wheel cut!

Thanks again Stew!

Chris