So I bought this lathe. It was a good deal. Not as good as I first thought. When I got it set up and was leveling it I noticed wear by the headstock that I should have noticed before. Like before I paid the guy. The guy who sold it was completely honest about the condition of the lathe, I just missed some stuff. The lathe is a JET copy of a
15 x 60 Clausing-Colchester. Because everything else on the machine is in pretty good shape I am considering several different options to make the ways better. The ways are hardened, hard enough that a file just skitters across instead of cutting. But not so hard that they can't be scraped with a carbide scraper. I know because I got out my scraper and tried. But still hard enough that the job would take a lot of time and my wrists already hurt enough. And I have never scraped vee ways, only flat. But I do have that Machine Tool Reconditioning book. Another option is to remove everything from the ways casting and bring it to a grinder who can do the work. This would take a lot of time, probably 20 hours, to remove and replace everything. Another option might be to make a mount for my Dumore tool post grinder and just grind the ways in place. This would require making the tailstock ways as good as possible first and then making some sort of mount for the Dumore grinder. So the first requirement would be to level the tailstock ways after making sure that all the way surfaces are flat. Then mount the grinder to the bottom half of the tailstock and just slide it along to perform the grinding. I'm sure I could come up with some sort of feed device so the the grinder would always be fed along at the same rate. I would for sure need to scrape in the bottom half of the tailstock to the ways if this method is going to work at all. I see a problem though and that is I don't know how to make sure that the tailstock ways remain parallel to the axis of the spindle. I suppose I could put a two inch diameter rod in the chuck that extends just a little over ten inches, indicate it to less than .0001" TIR, put my .0005" in 10.0" level on it, level it, then check the tailstock ways to see if they are level. Anybody done this? Anybody tried and failed? Any opinions? Thanks, Eric- posted
9 years ago