So I've wanted a rotary table or indexing head for the milling machine for quite some time, but the prices go all over the place. Then I started looking on what I had laying around that could be useful and decided to build an indexing head out of some random parts that I've found. Worst case scenario, I would do a fine rotary welding positioner.
The idea here is to use a worm drive box that I had for years and mount a 3 jaw chuck on one side and mount a stepper motor on the other side. The stepper motor will be controlled by an Arduino with a LCD shield that will allow me to get really accurate divisions, specially with the odd 12,5:1 ratio on the worm drive. This just makes everything simpler as I couldn't have accurately made the indexing hole plates I would go for the conventional way.
The indexing head can work on either vertical or horizontal position and I built a brake that will clamp the spindle in place. The chuck I had here is huge for this project. It's a 8" R?m chuck. A 5" or maybe a 6" chuck would be ideally. But I didn't want to spend the money on that. This entire project cost me 40$ and that was all the electronics.
Here are most of the parts:
Machining the base of the worm drive housing flat on the lathe:
First mock up and test with just a drill:
And the electronics and final stage:
And the first part what a knob to use on the worm drive that engage/disengage the spindle:
The software on the Arduino, allow for 5 modes:
Jog: Will jog whatever number of steps you set
Run: Will continuously run either direction will speed adjustment
Angle: It will rotate the angle you set on the controller
Step: You set the number of divisions you want
Ratio: You can set up to 3 different ratios if you need to use the stepper on another indexing head or whatever that use a different ratio.
It is indeed very accurate and works really good. I'm quite pleasing with it. So far the only issue is some play on the worm drive. I need to figure out something to reduce this play.
