Sometimes, I am such an id10t.

I spent a couple hours last night making a new trigger wheel from a scrap 3/16″ angle bracket that was in the junk box that came with my Stires trike. I used a 3-1/4″ hole saw in the the drill press to (slowly) cut out the disk, the bolted the current disk to the blank and hand ground it to size. With the original still bolted in place as a template, I center-punched for each hole to drill. I took the original off and proceeded to drill all 36 holes. Once the holes were drilled, I fitted a 3″ cutoff wheel to a drill arbor and used that to cut slots into each hole. A little judicious grinding, wire brushing and LOTS of filing to get the teeth in pretty good form. They are not CNC clean, or even manual rotary table clean, but they are very nice for generating timing pulses.

Well, if I needed a 36-2 trigger wheel, it would be good.

My excuse is that by the time I was ready to remove teeth, my brain was on autopilot and somehow removed two teeth instead of one. I didn’t even realize it until I was showing Toni the fruits of my labor.

In the interest of avoiding a shopping trip, I have a plan that may be able to salvage this wheel, a plan that is very much like applying a dental implant. I will drill a hole in the edge where the extra missing tooth should be, use short bit of fluxless welding rod as a reinforcing pin and braze on a similarly drilled replacement tooth. Grind and file the tooth to shape and we’re back in business. Even with brazing, the replacement will still be a lot more ferrous mass than a missing tooth or the previous wheel. If it doesn’t work out, I’ll be headed to Norton Metals.