Yes the plan is to use broaching to cut the swing gear. I only have a lathe so I'm going to use a profile tool in a boring bar holder and just slowly scrape away until I get to the right tooth depth and since I'm using aluminum for the swing ring I should not have too much trouble. As for indexing. My lathe has a gear reduction that can lock the spindle, so I can just enable the gear reduction cut a tooth and then disable it go to the next tooth on the gear reduction or skip a couple to divide, that way i can use my lathe as a poor man's indexing head
The only reason I was planing to add a center shaft was for rigidity. As I do not know how tight I'm going to be able get the hook rollers. I will just have to see how it works when I machine the parts and do some tests.
Shawn