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This week we started on the last part for the handshifter. All the other parts were made from scratch in stainless steel, but this piece was just the stock shifter that we had bent and fitted with a tab. The tricky bit is that it is mounted on a splined shaft. I made a rough sketch of what I had in mind while Aad counted the splines. There were 40 of them.


 
 

We decided to make the whole thing from one piece, so we took a strip of 15 x 40 x 200 mm stainless to begin with, and very roughly pre shaped it. Removing material now would make it less unbalanced while machining the hole. Aad welded a piece of pipe on just to be able to mount it in the lathe and the Bridgeport easily, this piece will be remove later.


 
 

Aad had bought a very rare spline cutting attachment for the Bridgeport years ago, and this was the perfect oppotunity to use it. Such a beautiful tool!! We found an old endmill that was damaged already and sacrificed that to grind in to a spline cutting tool. The material is very suitable for cutting splines in stainless steel.


 
 

The shifter part was mounted in an indexing table, 40 splines means 9 degrees between each spline. After several hours of preparation the actual cutting of the splines took maybe 10 minutes, it was fun to use this tool again!




 
 


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