Thursday, June 29, 2017

Much Better

I did the machining on the Brass at work today thanks to some excellent help from a guy who knows what the hell he is doing and went straight into the garage when I got home to throw that little lathe back together.
It took some finessing and a few good whacks with a small nylon mallet trying to get the runout on the chuck somewhat within a couple of thousandths but I'll be damned if this latest upgrade didn't absolutely transform that little fucker into a usable piece of equipment finally.
I'll let you take a look at the finish on this chunk of bar and let you see what you think.



That is far and away the best finish I have ever gotten out of the thing.

I made a few other adjustments as I was putting it back together and added a brass washer behind the wheel you turn for manual traveling to get rid of the wobble on the shaft when you were turning it.

Smoothed that right out too.

I might actually be able to make something , finally.

I got this thing last Christmas, that means I have been fighting this little bugger off and on for six months.

There are still about seven hundred and forty six little upgrades one could do to it if one was so inclined, I have seen some fabulous shit done to them on Youtube but I ain't that damn anal, yet.

I just want it to work right and do what it's supposed to do.

Unless something really bad happens to me I should have a few good years left to play with it and I can get some of these other little quirks worked out of it now at my leisure.

In the mean time I am quite a bit happier with it now between getting the cross slide slop and the tail stock mess somewhat under control finally.

1 comment:

SiGraybeard said...

Definitely looking good. I've seen some really good stuff done on those little lathes, but their quality out of the box is pretty "hit or miss". It's all a matter of how much time you want to spend on the machine vs. the results.

The last 5% of improvement takes 95% of the time you'll spend.



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