What tooling have you made for your lathe?

[mr venom]

i made this from a broken hydrolic ram off of a cat dozer and it was harder than all h... took me three days and a gallon of coolant

[eeengineer]

I like to make additional tooling for my existing QC toolpost.
Here are some that I use a lot.
First a QC dial indicator for truing in the 4 Jaw.
This is very stable, always at hand, Drops right in and works quite well.


One of the tools I constantly use is a cross drilling fixture. Once this is set up on center it allows you to drill holes, on center, almost at will.
It uses an auxiliary hand drill as power, Its constructed out of scrap bill parts and nothing is sacred. If I were building it again I would make the bearing holder longer and use two bearings. They are Sleeve bearings from McMasters with a thrust shoulder. The drill chuck came off a 50 year old dead electric drill. I have had it in my tool box for 40 years looking for a use.

This is shown on the SB 9" but, using a custom shim, I have set the tool posts so that the holders can be swapped from the 9" to the 10" without readjusting.

Finally there is a "QC Tool Post" grinder. I have only used this once to true some chuck jaws. I really dont like to grind on the lathes. I have seen several killed by doing this. I covered the ways with cloths, which I trew away after using them, and had two vacuum cleaners going at the same time. I still found crud.



There is a 1/2" square bar in the toolholder with a 3/8 grove milled down the middle. The "mini-die" grinder is clamped to this with hose clamps. This aligns the grinder paralled to the grove and thus parallel to the bed.

Jim B.

[HotGuns]

Here are but a few things I made for the lathe...

Radius/ball cutter


taper attachment


boring bar holder...uses 5C collets with wrench to tighten or loosen


collet closer for 5C collets




offset tailstock center

[JR_Williams]

I recently made a rear mounted cut off saw assembly for my Clausing lathe. I use it mainly for small brass parts but it works for steel. I have a spindle holding a slitting blade and is powered by a 3 phase motor with a VFD power source. It has a 100 watt motor and would be better with a larger motor. See the article on the unit at the attached site.

JRW
http://www.homemetalshopclub.org/news/1 ... df#Page=11

[Harold_V]

I recently made a rear mounted cut off saw assembly for my Clausing lathe.

Very nice! That should eliminate many of the problems with parting conventionally.

Harold

[Michael_Moore]

I made a stud-table to go on the cross-slide of my lathe. It already had dovetails for a rear toolpost.



More details on the making of it at

http://www.eurospares.com/lathes.htm

cheers,
Michael

[Harold_V]

I made a stud-table to go on the cross-slide of my lathe.

Do you use it for any specific purpose?

Harold

[Michael_Moore]

Hi Harold,

I haven't used it yet. I've got a few projects that seem like they'd benefit from being clamped to the table and bored with a boring bar held between centers. The old machining books show different setups where the work is clamped to the cross slide. Evan has shown a photo where he was facing the ends of a bar that was too long to get under a mill by clamping it to the lathe slide and using a flycutter in the spindle, and that also seemed like something that might need to be done some time.

It seems more common that these tables would have t-slots but I didn't want to buy a thicker piece of plate and throw a bunch of it away in chips so I drilled and tapped the 1/2-13 holes so I could use the clamp stud sets from the mill. I can always add extra holes as needed.

Using my Tapmatic self-reversing tapping head for all the holes didn't leave my hands sore the way hand tapping would have done!

cheers,
Michael

[Harold_V]

Hey Michael!
Thanks for the response. My question was driven by the arrangement of the studs in the photo, as if you had a project in mind.

Very nice setup. My Graziano has holes drilled and tapped on both sides of the cross slide (from the factory), which is how I mount the hydraulic duplicating attachment. I could easily emulate your setup for boring pieces that might be difficult in the mill.

Smart move using the Tapmatic. They tend to yield threads that are more uniform, and always started straight.

Harold

[Michael_Moore]

Think of those stud holes as emulating t-slots. Since I had to put some holes in so I picked a pattern that seemed likely to let me get a clamp most anywhere on the table.

cheers,
Michael

[tornitore45]

Greg B. can you explain how does your travel dial work?

Drive off the rack or the leadscrew?
Two dials ... one to count 1/10" and the other 1/100" ??
Are there gears?
Is that an ordinary travel indicator?
How you converted horizontal motion to move the indicator vertically?

Of course some question may make no sense given your actual solution.

Thanks

[aametalmaster]

Ball Turner.
Here is a large 3" steel ball i turned on my SB10K. I have lots of pics and plans if anyone wants them...Bob aametalmaster@yahoo.com