In article .com, jmiguez
says...

Jim Rozen what is the spindle threads and taper for your lathe? Also,
what taper do you have on the tail piece? I thought mine was something
like =BD" to the foot.

The spindle is 1.125-12 thread. It's an oddball I know. The
lathe came with a faceplate and a chuck. I've adapted a
four-jaw to fit that spindle.

Both the spindle taper and tailstock taper seem to be Morse number
two. I suspect that at some point in its life, somebody modified
them to be MT-2, because I think those machines came with Jarno
Tapers in them.

I made a couple of centers on the lathe using
=BD" to the foot taper. They seem to fit. They hold and I have to
drive them out with a piece of =BD tubing I stick into the backend of
the spindle and tap with a ball peen hammer. For the tail stock, I
tried a MT2 it didn't fit. However, my dad use to wrap a piece of
thin copper around the MT2 dead centers and they held. I do the same.
I know admitting this will probably get me burned at the stake for
blasphemy.=20

Not at all. I think you can still purchase jarno centers from MSC.
The nice thing about centers like that is that in principle they
have excellent accuracy, and using the copper as a bodge will
degrade that, as well as reduce the rigidty of the setup. Old
lathes like this can still do some nice work.

One thing I have not mentioned about my lathe is that the crossfeed
handle has *no* graduations on it. If yours is the same then
you will be severely hampered by it when it comes time to actually
use it to do any serious work, because you will be unable to
turn diameters to a tolerance of better than about ten thousanths
of an inch.

If your machine was factory-fitted with a graduated dial (a close
friend has one which is a bit more recent, and that is so-equipped)
then you can disregard the comment. However if you don't have
any graduated dial, I would suggest the following approach - if
you want to use the machine for serious work:

1) carefully remove the entire crossfeed screw, handle, and bushing.
The bushing unscrews from the front of the carriage, pad the wrench
so you don't twist up the hex, mine seemed to be almost hand-filed
into a hex, not a standard size really.

2) remove the nut from the cross slide.

3) fabricate a new nut, and obtain another crossfeed screw
and dial assembly from something like a logan or a south bend.

4) you will have to modify the threaded bushing of the newer
assembly to fit into the carriage of your machine I suspect.
This would mean either turning it down and re-threading if
it is larger, or making up an ID/OD threaded bushing if it
is too small.

But this sort of transplant does two things: it allows a
modern graduated dial so your machine can be counted on to
hit diameters within a thousanth or so. And it preserves
the original part which could be re-installed in the machine
to put it back into the condition it was in when you got it.

A former owner of my machine was obviously hampered by the
lack of graduations, because there are a few that are hand-scratched
into the ball handle and the nose of the bushing.

Jim


--
==================================================
please reply to:
JRR(zero) at pkmfgvm4 (dot) vnet (dot) ibm (dot) com
==================================================