Quote Originally Posted by IanW View Post
Nice job, Dave! It looks a bit more flash than my home-made router so if it works as well (it should!) you are way ahead...

You can do a pretty neat job on a thumbscrew by hand if necessary. I have done it a couple of ways to show how you cam make thumbscrews without a metal lathe & to make a bit of variation in my thumbscrews - gets a bit boring if they all look identical. Here's one done with a file, beside a machine-knurled example:
Attachment 506593

Takes a bit of patience & care laying out the lines. You spin the screw either in your wood lathe or a battery drill (slowly) to file the circular lines. Not to everyone's taste, perhaps, but offers a way for the backyard warrior to make usable thumbscrews...


And a very nice knurling job Bob - beautifully-defined pyramids & indents! I am wondering if that's because the the scissor tool works better on random diameters? I've got the cheap, fixed double-wheel type, which does a good job on some diameters, but it's not so easy to get a good knurl on others. If I persist long enough, it eventually grinds the piece down to a diameter where the wheels match up & I get a decent knurl, but rarely as perfect as what you achieved there!

And I would've made a mandrel just as you did if faced with the same job. As any lathe operator soon learns, the way to make parts like thumb screws is to do the knurling early, while you have a large chunk of metal for the lathe chuck to grasp. But I wanted to re-knurl some of my earlier attempts at thumbscrews etc. and eventually figured out this was the way to do it...

Cheers,
That looks really good, I'll give that a try when I need something else knurled. Thanks for the post