Some manual indexing heads are equipped with a power drive provision.

A manual indexing head includes a hand crank.

Brown and Sharpe indexing heads include a set of 3 indexing plates.

CNC indexing heads may be controlled in two different modes.

Three-jaw chucks are often used on lathes and indexing heads.

Four-jaw chucks can be found on lathes and indexing heads.

Planers and indexing heads had been combined before, but never in the winning form factor that William created specifically for gears.

A rotary fixture used in this fashion is more appropriately called a dividing head (indexing head).

The workpiece is held in the indexing head in the same manner as a metalworking lathe.

This is most commonly a chuck but can include a collet fitted directly into the spindle on the indexing head, faceplate, or between centers.

John Ambrose has adapted the cross slide on his lathe and added an indexing head for cutting flutes with a router (above right)

This enables the machine's main CNC controller to control the indexing head just like it would control the other axes of the machine.

This is simpler than setting up a manual indexing head because there is no need to interchange indexing plates or to calculate which hole positions to use.

Spur may be cut or ground on a milling machine or jig grinder utilizing a numbered gear cutter, and any indexing head or rotary table.

Indexing heads are usually used on the tables of milling machines, but may be used on many other machine tools including drill presses, grinders, and boring machines.

The operator enters the desired angle into a control box attached to the indexing head and it automatically rotates to the desired position and locks into place for machining.

CNC indexing heads are similar in design to the manual variety except that they have a servo motor coupled to the spindle instead of a hand crank and indexing plates.

An important product came in 1874 with William's invention of the first bevel gear planer, a planer with integral indexing head designed to specialize in planing bevel gears.

An indexing head, also known as a dividing head or spiral head, is a specialized tool that allows a workpiece to be circularly indexed; that is, easily and precisely rotated to preset angles or circular divisions.

Besides a wide variety of specialized production machines, the archetypal multipurpose milling machine of the late 19th and early 20th centuries was a heavy knee-and-column horizontal-spindle design with power table feeds, indexing head, and a stout overarm to support the arbor.

Although the archetypal toolpath of a planer is linear, helical toolpaths can be accomplished via features that correlate the tool's linear advancement to simultaneous workpiece rotation (for example, an indexing head with linkage to the main motion of the planer).

It solved the problem of 3-axis travel (i.e., the axes that we now call XYZ) much more elegantly than had been done in the past, and it allowed for the milling of spirals using an indexing head fed in coordination with the table feed.