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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