My lathe bed is level,
I have carefully adjusted all bolts on the bench and shimmed it level to the floor while watching the center to center alignment.
Afterwhich I was able to make the centers align laterally without problems.
But the vertical adjust is still out of alignment by a few thousands of an inch.
How do I adjust the Vertical relationship? Do I use shims, or is there a better method?
Or do I still have a twist in the bed. If so would I shim that instead?
Thanks,
Dennis
Is the tailstock ram axis higher or lower than the headstock spindle axis? I have heard that on new lathes they sometimes set the tailstock spindle axis a few thou high so as it wears in it will be pretty close to dead nuts. If you do the math, you will see that a height error of e.g. .002" doesn't give you much error in machining a perfect cylinder. Anyway, if the tailstock is high then metal has to be removed to bring it down, but the normal fix for a low tailstock (the only one I've heard) is shims. All tailstocks are made in 2 parts that move relative to each other - that's how you do tailstock setover. The shims go between the parts.
I did quite a bit of fiddling on my SB9 to get it perfectly aligned, and I have never bothered to get that few thou out of the tailstock vertical axis. That's on the long list of "someday" items ..
Grant
drogren wrote:
Is this high, or low? Is the machine new, or used.
If it is new, it's probably high, and the manufacturer made it that way to double the effective lifetime of the tailstock alignment. If it's used, it's already worn a bunch and you should split the tailstock assembly and put a few thou of brass shim between the two parts. This is the standard approach.
Jim
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