# The Stars have aligned



## techonehundred (May 25, 2011)

I think the stars finally aligned. Last year I found a lathe on Fleabay and to my surprise I won it with my bid of $250.  It is a Select 10 X24 which is a very close older brother of the Jet 1024P. When I got the lathe home, I found both good and bad. It had a set true chuck, so I got my moneys worth, but one of the big things were the owner, had removed all of the half nut parts. Select was out of business and Jet did not have parts for the 1024. I then started to look at the G9249 from Grizzly and it looked to be very close to the same. So, I ordered the Halfnut closers from Grizzly. I then built the gib and reverse engineered the scroll mechanism. When I installed this I began to look and the leadscrew did not look centered in the closers. After a quick forum request from others that had the 9249, it turns out I missed on a minor spec. the 9249 had a .870 leadscrew, and my lathe had a .750 . So I could not use the threaded half-nut inserts from that lathe. I could not really get in close to measure it, but had a couple pieces of drill rod, and it seemed that I had 1/8 on one side of the leadscrew and ¼ on the other. So I have an older 9 x 18 atlas lathe with one or two threading gears and found I could do a 8 tpi thread. I decided No Guts No Glory and then hand ground an Acme internal threading tool. So I got out my trusty 4 jaw chuck and decided to try to cut my own inserts for the halfnuts. I used a 1.5 round of Brass and offset the center .125 and bored the hole for the threads. This lathe is pretty flimsy(understatement of the year), so I would only take a .003 cut per pass. I used the leadscrew to test the threads and things were looking promising. I then split the nut and mounted it to both halves of the closer. When I installed everything I just sat back in amazement on how everything worked and fit with no perceptible play. Even the feed-threading lockout that I had to reverse engineer was working right.  Now to get working on the threading indicator.
For a person that is fairly new to machining, being able to make non-existing parts and modify available parts and have all of it work together just as it should. There is no better feeling.


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## GOOFY063 (May 25, 2011)

th_wwp th_wwp th_wwp


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## mu38&Bg# (May 25, 2011)

Excellent! Diving into something not knowing what's going to happen and coming out on top is always great.


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