Following my last posting here in regard to my workshop lease coming to an end and therefore, having to dispose of some of the large machines, including the gear hobber, so I could move to a smaller workshop area, I started having a clear out. In doing so I came across a project that my father started on in 1971 and I also did some work on in 1998. But never got around to finishing.

And that was to get working and put back into use a Swiss manufactured Mikron type 79 gear hobbing machine. This machine has a small footprint and will fit into a small space with no problem. The hobber is only designed to produce spur gears and pinions, but if I could get it working again. It would allow me to re-introduce some of the conversions pack that had to be removed. The only down side is that I would only be able to re-introduce the conversions that use spur gears or pinions as the final drive gear. This would mean however, I could start to produce again most if not all of the Heljan conversions, Hornby and Bachmann 08/09, and some Bachmann conversions.

As a test once I had the hobber working I cut some Lima Class 20 gears. Examples of these can be seen below.However, before I can start re-introducing any of the conversions I need to get the required change gears made and then test the production process and make new fixtures to cut the gear blanks on and all this will take some time.

This is a swiss made Mikron gear hobbing machine type 79. It is mainly designed to produce spur gears, pinions, ratchets etc. It is has the capacity to cut teeth from 6 to 390 to a maximum size of 1 Module (26DP)

This shows the setup and fixture for cutting the Lima Class 20 final drive gears. This gear have 10 teeth and a 2.5mm bore.

These are finished Lima Class 20 final drive gears.