I picked up four old school Ringle titanium
quick releases for a really cheap price on Ebay. The reason they
were so cheap is that they had no QR nuts. Not a problem with the
shop available.
There are circular nuts, square ones, diamond-shaped, and rectangular
nuts out there but I wasn't aware of a single one that had three
sides. I wanted to make something different, so three-sided nuts
it was. I had learned how to make tapers on the lathe earlier but
didn't know how to use an indexing head on the mill and this was the
chance to learn.
An indexing head is a device that holds a piece
of metal and allows you to rotate that piece a given angle and do so
without having to re-adjust the mill on every cut. That way you
can repeat the cut as many times as you need as you rotate the
piece. So
you put the indexing head in the mill's vise and machine one side, then
turn it and mill the next face. In this case, the indexing head
was rotated 120 degrees after every cut. The three-sided nuts were made
for both wheel (larger ones) and seat QR's (smaller ones)
Also displayed is a few nuts that were designed to mimic the standard
Ringle QR nut (but not exactly, artistic license and all).
These are the four QR's that I picked up
for cheap. The top one is the original Ringle design. It's
not threaded as it's being cut off and re-threaded as a seatpost
binder. The other three are a later design that will go well on
bikes from the mid-90s. These models have the the titanium rods
but the rod of the lower QR is being replaced with a shorter stainless
steel threaded rod so it will work on a seatpost too.
I also made a few QR nuts that mimic the original Ringle design, shown
on top of the picture below. I made a few changes in the
nuts. One thing is that they are one piece vs. the original with
a two piece nut. Second, they newer ones are tapered a little
more. It wasn't a problem with not being able to measure or cut
the original taper rather it's just what I felt like doing.