On Thu, 14 Dec 2017 19:34:54 -0800, Larry Jaques
wrote:

On Wed, 13 Dec 2017 23:52:32 -0500, Gerry
wrote:

On Wed, 13 Dec 2017 07:15:31 -0500, "Jim Wilkins"
wrote:

"John B." wrote in message
...
On Tue, 12 Dec 2017 17:23:04 -0500, Ed Huntress
wrote:

On Tue, 12 Dec 2017 14:57:53 -0700, Bob La Londe
wrote:

On 12/12/2017 2:31 PM, DoN. Nichols wrote:
On 2017-12-11, Bob La Londe wrote:

I watched one the other day that was a sort of interesting trick
for
turning tapers "between centers." You put a boring head in the
tail
stock. For low angle tapers you can just put a center in the
boring
head, and for sharper angles you can use a cup with a ball
bearing in
the chuck and the boring head. I get all of that and it makes
sense.
What got me and the guy makign the video didn't show (or I
missed it) is:

How do you make sure the center or ball bearing cup in the
boring head
is on center vertically?

Perhaps put a level on the dovetail with it extended a bit?

Since I don't have to turn a lot of tapers I thought this might
be a
nice stop gap technique instead of making a taper attachment for
my lathe.

Many (though not all) lathes have provisions for offsetting the
tailstock to do taper turning between centers. You loosen the
tailstock
clamp to the bed, loosen a screw in the middle of the back side
of the
tailstock, and tighten the one in the front side to move the
tailstock
ram back. (Or the other way around, to move it towards you,
depending
on whether you want the big end of the taper towards the
tailstock or
the headstock.) With this, there is no question as to whether
the
height of the center is correct.

However, you need to come up with a way to set the tailstock
back on horizontal center when you are done. There are various
tricks
for this.

The two lathes which I have had which do not have this feature
are the Unimat SL-1000 (on that, you rotate the headstock to
shift the
tip back or forward), and the Emco-Maier Compact-5/CNC, which
being a CNC
lathe, can do tapers without the trick. However, the same
tailstock is
used on the manual Compact-5, so there such a trick would be
useful.

Enjoy,
DoN.


Yeah, a couple folks have said, "Just offset the tail stock BOY!!!"
LOL.

I donwanna. LOL.

On the same work piece I need to have the tail stock in line, and
separately I need to be able to turn the longish taper. I might
have
mentioned I might need to do a few of them down the road. I had
already
resigned myself to building a guide rod style taper attachment when
I
ran across the other offset adapter ideas like the boring head
idea.
Then somebody pointed out the purpose built adapter that's dead
cheap.
I reckon I can level that faster than I can put a guide rod taper
attachment on the lathe.

I tend to spend way to much time thinking about these things
looking for
the easiest way to get a satisfactory result.


That is not a bad thing. It will save you from doing a lot of
time-consuming or expensive things that you'll want to kick yourself
for when you finally *do* realize what the easy or cheap way was.
g

These days, I just sit and think about little jobs before tackling
them, if it's something I haven't done before. Fortunately, nobody
is
watching me or paying me to do it.

In the Air Force shops there used to be a joke - maybe it actually
happened. The inspector comes in the shop and one guy is just
sitting
there staring off into space and a second guy is frantically turning
pages in the Machinery's Handbook and scribbling numbers on a piece
of
paper.

The Inspector marks the guy staring off into space as "Not Working"
and the guy with the book as "Working" when in actual fact the guy
staring off into space was calculating the number and sequence of
"set
ups" he would use to machine the part and the guy with the book was
trying to figure out how to cut threads :-)
--
Cheers,

John B.

A former Air Force repairman told me that when he had nothing to fix
he wandered around carrying a clipboard as though he was an inspector,
so no one would dare bother him.
-jsw

Chap I used to work for got bored one day so he and a buddy each put
ten sheets of blank copy paper in a new file folder and visited every
office in the provincial gov't department headquarters complex where
they worked - took a full week to complete their "inspection"!

TFF, and so ironic & sad.

P.S: Um, what did their bosses say when they didn't shop up on the job
for a week?
But they did show up, slack time so they did their work and still had
time for "inspection".