Camlock Spindle Assembly again

The Camlock Spindle Nose Assembly has the camlock part mounted on or secured to the spindle. On my lathe it appears to be a separate piece that is either pressed on or thread mounted and then secured somehow. Probably not welded.

Somebody or somewhere the camlock assembly must be made by somebody. But who or where. It certainly is not intergral with the spindle as the cost of removing all the metal around the spindle part would be enormous.

So does anyone know where the Camlock Spindle assembly is available?

Thanks Bob AZ

Can you provide details of what lathe you have so others can note it. I have a D1-4 Camlock on my Harrison M300 and all indications are that the spindle is one piece, the camlock assembly being integral with the spindle.

David

I have a Birmingham lathe. 13" X 40". There appears to be a brass sleeve that separates the spindle proper from the camlock assembly. I have not opened up or removed the spindle to confirm this. Another reply suggests that the whole spindle assembly, camlock and all starts life as a casting and lots of maching from there.

I would like to have a camlock assembly, spindle side of things, that I could thread to fit a LeBlond lathe that has threads. I don't understand that this would be difficult, if it would be.

Thanks for the response. Bob AZ

Jon

Yes I am referring to the spindle side of things.

I was hoping to obtain a camlock assembly, mount it to another camlock assembly, center/true as necessary and thread it to fit the lathe in question. A LeBlond lathe in this case. Not a job for the novice but certainly within the capability of many.

Bob AZ

I think you'll find manufacturers lay claim to machining their spindles from forgings. >

Tom

From previous threads on Birmingham lathes they are chinese so how they make them may be different from how US and UK makers do their camlock spindle. One point in doing your threading method will be, I expect, you won't get the accuracy desired for the mount trueness so a clean up of the camlock face and taper would be needed which will require a toolpost grinder in all likelihood. The other problem which was brought up recently on another thread is that increasing the extension of the chuck is not beneficial to the rigidity and can increase the likelihood of chatter.

Yes, Tom, that is what I really MEANT to say! Thanks for the correction.

Jon

I know this is an old thread but I have a metric buttload of really expensive beautiful chucks all with the d1-4 camlock backplates....

I have a couple of smaller lathes but want to build a large one. I would like to incorporate the camlock into the spindle and was wondering if anyone ever got anywhere with this? ALSO, another use I have considered is having a camlock spindle nose to mount to a rotary table because that would be awesome for changing out chucks...

-jsw

I recently adapted an eight inch manual chuck to my CNC lathe. This CNC lathe has an A type spindle nose so I used a faceplate and bolted the manual chuck to it. However, I considered putting the camlock features in the faceplate and would have done so but for the 4 T slots already machined into the faceplate. There is plenty of info online and producing your own would not be hard to do. For someone who can build a larger lathe the spindle nose machining should be no problem. Machining the taper is easy and I have repaired a couple chucks over the years that had badly damaged tapers, as well as made adapters that fit various machine spindle tapers. Camlocks are simple, imprecise, and easy to produce mechanisms that locate a device on a taper very accurately which is why they are so common. Eric