On 2008-02-06, John Martin wrote:
On Feb 5, 7:26*pm, wrote:
I am trying to cut a morse taper shaft 3MT and 2MT and have setup the
topslide to what I thought was the correct angle, but he taper seems
slightly off. Is there any one who has turned a morse taper, that can
offer advice??. I know that morse taper reamers are available for
making or tidying up MT sockets, is there anything for finish cutting
MT shafts????.

Cheers

There is nothing I've ever heard of for reaming or cleaning up male
Morse taper. It is handy to have a spare Morse taper socket to use to
test the workpiece with spotting blue - much handier than trying it in
the lathe spindle.

I've turned quite a few Morse tapers. I do them by holding the
workpiece between centers and ofsetting the tailstock. It works
better than angling the compound because you can easily make minor
adjustments to the tailstock offset. It's more difficult to make
minor adjustments to the compound angle.

The one problem with it is that it is also very sensitive to
workpiece length (between centers). This means that you can't simply
put a known good taper (say a male taper gauge) between centers, set the
offset and then swap in your workpiece. This will work only if the
workpiece is *precisely* the same distance between centers as the
reference. (And it is even difficult to set up to precisely measure the
distance between the center holes on the two items.)

Enjoy,
DoN.

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