One of the reasons I got my mill was to make gears for orreries, tellurions and possibly in time an antikythera mechanism. The thought of using an indexing wheel for larger gears fills me with dread - all too easily I will forget which gear tooth I last cut and turn the indexing wheel to the wrong angle! So I decided to make an automatic system and the best and quickest way to make gears easily was to make a gear hobber. This requires synchronising the mill spindle speed to the rotary table. In order to do so I have to accurately know the speed of the spindle - hence the need for an optical encoder wheel.
I have designed 2 - a 64 toothed wheel and one with 128 teeth, and will try them out to see which one performs best. The 128 toothed wheel is in another post - the forum only allows 3 files per topic.
The drawing and machining cycles were entirely completed using Easymill CAD and CAM.