Right on, Jim. It leads to quadratic equations and Pythagoras. I had tried to take a generalized approach with construction. Thanks.
That's too pessimistic. The apparent feed size error drops rapidly with workpiece size and is normally negligible.
With 0.005" height error simple Pythagoras shows
workpiece size Apparent feed error % of Height 0.1" 0.00025" 5% 1.0" 0.000025" 0.5% 10" 0.0000025" 0.05%
Jim
A horizontal offset would do that -- but that's easily corrected. The tapering effect of a vertical offset is much less. On 1" dia stock, a vertical offset of .005" would produce a diametral error or taper of about 25 microinches.
Don't worry about it!
Sorry it has taken so long to followup on this. Having 3 kids under 4 yrs of age has a way of eating up all your time. Thanks for all the input guys. At this point I am going to leave things alone, since I will be moving the lathe to my new shop soon. After setting it up there, giving it time to settle-in and checking the alignment of everything, I will decide if I need to worry about the tailstock being
0.005" high. I do gunsmithing as a hobby and typically like to get things lined up to less than 0.0005" when cutting a chamber. I have been using a floating reamer holder lately when chambering barrels on my old Enco lathe and it seems to work well and compensates for up to 0.030" axial error, so it's probably not a big enough issue to worry about.Thanks,
Theron
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