FH - indicators

 I've decided, mainly at the behest my son that the Huntmaster is going to have indicators. I've bought some small circular indicators from eBay which will look the part but I'll need to make some stems to put them in the right place and to fit them to the bike. I made this drawing to show what I wanted to machine and I'll do that on the mini-lathe.

We'll start by cutting four blanks from 0.515" hex bar stock. This is EN1A.

With the first end faced and centred it's time to put some marking blue on the far end in order to turn all the blanks to length. We'll start drilling the 3 millimetre hole for the cable at this point as well. I've got some long series drills just for the purpose.

The next step is to face the ends to length, centre drill and drill 3 mm through the length of the blank. Then we'll turn the M8 thread for the indicator lamp and start reducing the hex to the final diameter for the stem. We'll do this in two halves because we'll want to switch ends in order to turn the 5/16 CEI thread that holds the stem to the bike.

With the outer end of the stem finished on all four examples it's time to look at the inner end. This has a 5/16 CEI thread to bolt into the original fastenings on the Huntmaster. In most cases there is sufficient hexagon left available for us to be able to hold the stems in three jaw chuck. 

First we need to use the height gauge to mark off the length of the 5/16 thread and the height of the nut that we will need to fit the stems to the bike. I painted all the stems with Dykem to facilitate the marking out.

I've got the 5/16 thread now on all the stems, and I've drilled through 3 mm for the wire to pass through from the indicator lamp. 

For the next step I wanted to hold the stems in the collet chuck to avoid damaging the fine 5/16 CEI thread. The next step is to finish the main stem length turn it to size and then to turn a feature in the end to give the stem a little more shape.

There are three examples of the finished article you'll notice the feature that I was talking about and you're probably also noticed that the hex element is not the same length in all of those examples -  we'll have to refine that later.

Here's one of the short stems fitted to the lamp and fitted the front of the bike - it's looking pretty good I think. 

Now, there's a bit of refining to do on the height of those hexagon sections but then we'll assemble these to the lamps, degrease them and paint them.

I'll use a little bit of wood as a jig while I paint them:

Not too shabby.