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Help Identify this Indexing Head

gregudolph

Plastic
Joined
Jan 18, 2020
Found this indexing head in a cabinet in our shop that hasn’t been opened in a long while. It seems to have a lot of different uses. Was hoping someone could identify it and possibly direct me to a manual for it.
Thanks,
Greg
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NEWS was a Yuasa (Japan) brand in the 1970's. I think it might have stood for New England Wholesale Supply. The head is a fairly faithful copy of a Brown and Sharpe universal dividing head, so a B&S manual or even a Machinery's Handbook should get you going.

The gears are for spiral milling and not much use unless you have a universal horizontal mill with the power feed box to drive the gears.

Back then, several of the big tool dealers sold more or less identical Japanese copies of the various size B&S dividing heads. I bought one of the smallest size (no gears) from Rutland Tool in California. I think Enco had their own versions.

Larry
 
Brown & Sharpe never used a box for gears to drive the dividing head. They used open gears on the left end of the table, where about everyone else drove from the right end of the table. Since the head looks like it was set up for table drive, there must have been a Brown & Sharpe mill in the shop at one time.
 
I have a smaller "News" dividing head I bought off ebay some years back. I first came upon mention of the "News" brand in "The Machinist Bedside Reader". Somewhere along the line, I forget where, I learned "News" was a brand label put on Yuasa-made tooling. No complaints about the News dividing head and foot-stock. My complaint rested with the seller. Apparently, while a lot of the parts such as the collets were still in original preservative, someone must have used the head for circular milling operations. There was a bit of uneven wear on the bronze worm gear. I adjusted out the gear lash as much as possible and the head works fine for what I do. I got mine with several index plates, collets, & center for the dividing head. The seller represented the head as in "as new condition" but given the condition of the bronze worm gear, "as new" was only "skin deep". I got in touch with Yuasa's USA office and they said the head was no longer in production, no parts available as far as the worm/worm gear. Were the parts available, I was told the cost would be several time what I had in the entire dividing head and all its accessory parts. I've used it for a number of jobs including making some spur gears.

My News dividing head is not able to be setup for differential indexing, let alone helical milling operations. I like it because it is light enough to be easily lifted off a shelf and put onto the table of my milling machine. I also have an Ellis dividing head in the same size range, with universal adjustment (angles in two directions). The result is the Ellis diving head is a bit lighter and not so rigid as the News dividing head.

Setting aside the wear on the bronze worm gear, the News dividing head is otherwise very well made and pretty much a "generic" dividing head.
 








 
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