Clever Thread Cutting Gadget

Microprocessors and computers enable great simplification of mechanisms and the addition of lots of functionality that would have been impractical or expensive. Consider how much more your handheld iPod MP-3 player can do versus an Old School Jukebox.

The same is true in the machining world. A CNC mill or lathe offers endless flexibility compared to the manual equivalent, and often requires less tooling to boot. Consider, for example, that no rotary table is needed to cut curves with a CNC mill. No taper attachment is needed to cut tapers on a CNC lathe.

Along comes a clever device for threading:

As you can see from the video, its basically a purpose-built thread milling machine. He spins the round workpiece in the 3-jaw chuck, the thread mill has its own simple right angle spindle (just an ordinary die grinder modified), and a micro-controller of some kind allows arbitrary threads to be entered so that steppers will advance the thread mill at the appropriate feedrate to cut any desired thread pitch.

Cool beans!

Now the question for this poster is how best to monetize their invention. I wonder what sort of applications would find the machine particularly suitable? Certainly plumbers and pipe fitters cut a lot of threads using taps and dies. Would they prefer a machine like this? Not clear. Machine shops will already have plenty of ways to cut threads, so I’m not sure they’d be a good market. If you’ve got a good idea for a market for this fellow’s product, head over to CNCZone (the link attached to “poster”) and tell him what you think.

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