Jim Stewart fired this volley in
news
It only takes a couple
of minutes to mount the indicator, loosen the
bolts and recenter the chuck, but I was hoping
for a little more repeatability.

Am I asking for too much here?



I think you need a different lathe for each chuck. G
Yeah... you're probably asking a bit much, but you can check a few
things.

"Just-any-ol'" faceplate may not have a matching centering taper on
its back to fit your spindle-nose. Some spindles don't have them at
all.

On my Reed, part of the job of fitting a new faceplate was to cut a
short, steep taper in the back of the hole, so it would JUST fit flush
on the spindle shoulder as it engaged the matching male taper at the
headstock end of the threaded area of the spindle nose. It was a
twitchy operation (at the time) because I didn't figure out the math
to determine how much to cut at taper to move the plate back xx ten-
thousanths. Like another discussion going on here, I had to use
plasti-gauge to measure the plate-to-shoulder gap, because no other
tool I had would reach and measure there at the same time.

As clunky as that old lathe is, the faceplate mounts true to about a
thousanth every time. That's still not half-a-thou, but close enough
for almost everything I do with it. My 3-jaw chuck isn't that
accurate.

LLoyd