Refurbish a bargain eBay Spin Indexer

[goodfellow]

Sometimes you just get lucky. This "ugly duckling" Spin Indexer was listed on e-Bay at a starting price of $.99 -- and it didn't move. So I felt happy for myself when I won it, but sort of bad for the poor guy that was selling it. I offered to pay a little extra for S/H and he was eager and thankful for the offer.  It arrived yesterday and as I suspected, it was binding and beat up, but by the looks of it, someone got some real good use out of it.





The surprise is that it was a Taiwanese indexer (much preferred over the Chinese verisons) and as a bonus it had a VERY nice Hardinge 1" 5C collet still installed. The Hardinge collet cleaned up real nice and is worth about $20 on the used tool market --





The front and rear collars were corroded on the shaft, but a little Kroil soak got them loose. It's not a very delicate tool and only has a few precision parts, but it was very corroded and crusty due to neglect.







All the parts went into the parts washer and were finally cleaned and shined up with a 6" brass wheel on the bench grinder.



A little hammered paint and some careful reassembly makes this a welcome addition to my machine tooling collection.







Finished up and final drying in the hot afternoon sun



The indexer is not a substitute for a good rotary table or dividing head, but for readily divisible angles it is very easy to setup and use. Work holding is accomplished by standard 5C collets.

[Uncle Buck]

Great buy and nicely done on the refurbishment.
Sweet tooling addition as well!