I am something of a creature of convenience if it doesn't sacrifice accuracy too much. Anything which will fit in my milling vice instead of needing to be fastened to the milling table (and zeroed in) is a win as far as I'm concerned. I've been wanting to build a simple indexing device to fit in my milling vice for years, but everytime I started thinking about it, I got hung up on details and abandoned the project. Turns out I had this spin indexer that I had bought at Enco many years ago. It was real bottom of the barrel as far as quality goes and I rarely used it. I had milled the feet off of it several years ago so I could clamp it in my vice, but it still stood up pretty high. Also, I hadn't gone to a lot of trouble to make sure the axis was parallell to the vice jaws, in any direction.
Tonight I drug it out, sawed off the rest of the base, then milled the bottom flat and parallel with the axis. Next I milled a flat on each side to register with the vice jaws. After considerable fiddling and a number of passes, I got the two side flats parallel with the axis to within a couple of thou end to end. Since I do mostly short work, like gears, that accuracy will be more than sufficient.
Here are a couple of pictures showing the flats and showing the indexer mounted in the vice. Think this will get a lot more use now!
PS: You can see a large void in the bottom where I cut off the base. Won't hurt anything, but... Also, there's a lot of bondo coating the surface to make it pretty. Again, won't hurt anything now!!!
Chuck
