hello welcome to Enots engineering i'm alan
today in the workshop i'm making a anvil extension for my dial indicator
it's one of these plunger type indicators
and this is the extension i made the reason why i made the extension is i
couldn't get enough travel on the indicator when it was in a block
on my lathe another thing i want to mention is
they're cutting on the lathe now i've come across a program that Evan sent me
that is made for thread cutting on
the south bend lathe and the Boxford it covers
about 30 different types of lathe whether you have the gears
or the norton gearbox whether it's metric
or imperial and i found this useful because
you could put a thread that you want to cut
put the details in and it will calculate the gears that you need to cut this thread
now that's useful if you've lost the gear or you've broken the gear
and you still want to cut a certain thread
it'll work out different combinations with different gears
now on a Boxford chart you'll just get one set of gears that you can use
and that's it but this could work out up to 10 different types of gear trains
so it will be useful if you have lost
some gears or broken them or even if you're trying to cut a
metric thread on an imperial lathe or imperial thread on the metric lathe and
you just wanted to know what gears you needed to do that
so have a look at the program i'll put the link at the beginning of the video
in the video description
so let's go into the workshop and see how we make the anvil for the dial indicator
this is how i measured the pitch of the thread these are more and wright
thread pitch gauges and this is for a 6BA thread and when i put the
pitch gauge onto the screw it fits okay
so that's why i decided to use a 6BA thread on the end
set my compound slide over about three degrees
and with a small file i just want to put the radius on the end
turn that round in the chuck
the first thing is cut this excess off
i'll use the saw for that because it's so thin
I think we are in for some rain
0.1105
i've selected a BA die and this is a 6BA
it's the nearest thread i can find to the dial indicator thread
i know it's not right because when it goes most of the way in
it starts to lock up so it's probably 90 percent there but
i don't know what they use on a Baty dial indicator
i've been looking on the internet it could be
UNF BA or metric depending on what indicator it is
The nearest to it is 6BA which i will use on this
I'm fitting my steering wheel in the headstock at the back
so i can turn the headstock
just tightens up with a hand screw and then i can move the headstock
take the tool post off
and now i've put the 6BA
die in the holder put that in the tailstock
it should push up against the face its there
now what i want to do is turn the die around so that the thread
goes up to the face take it out put it backwards
i've seen the problem already because this die is recessed on the back
it'll touch the chuck jaw so i'll have to bring the
part a bit further out in the chuck
so that should be able to go back in there
pick up on the thread
okay it's up to the face
i'll just use the file to clear that fraze off
that should fit
now i have an extension anvil
now on the Boxford lathe the saddle has a pad on the front
area this pad here originally was machined and it was
painted over but that is flat and square and you can use that
as a stop
just clamps onto the vee holds the dial indicator or i can change
the dial indicator for a solid stop
or i've also made a turret with different lengths of bar so you can
have different settings if you're doing a production run or
something like that and when the dial indicator anvil hits
the pad the dial indicator will start to move
so you can set that to the depth that you want
you can see with the ball type anvil fitted
that the saddle hits the block
the dial indicator only goes around about
seven times and then it stops when the saddle hits the block
with the extension fitted
it will rotate
25 revolutions and even then the saddle
is still clear of the block
here are some of the anvils that i've collected or made over the years
all for different job
oh well there's a selection of anvils that fit the dial indicator
i hope that was useful i hope you enjoyed it and we'll see you next time
on Enots engineering