Narex boring facing head

[Blogwitch]

Peter,

A few years ago I bought a boring head second hand that did everything that mine now does, but the mounting spindle was bent. I paid 35bucks for it and was repaired in about an hour, but like your suspicions about use, the datum lines were almost completely worn away, and was very hard to set, even though it was super accurate (0.0001" datum settings) giving 0.0002" accuracy down a bore.
It was a semi automatic one, with the stop bar being used, the head stopped turning on the outside and you fed the tool one way or another by turning a little key that you inserted into the key slot in the side.
I gave it to a friend of mine and he was quite happy using it, he had better eyesight than myself.

Straightening out the arbor by turning the 3MT down to a parallel 1/2" arbor while the head was held in accurately bored soft jaws..

John

 

[Naiveambition]

thank you John for the info. I had read the whole manual and while reading the back facing section the writer changed his wording to make it semi understandable which he seemed to do on every section. Put the manual with arc website plus narex website and you'll have a decent understanding
Then your post confirmed and am all good. Well except I lost one of the dogs. Didn't see or hear it so it could be anywhere:wall:

Works all the way it should. I played around on some delrin and was able to get a great finish boring and facing. Boring worked better hand feeding vs the dial feed but I wouldn't attempt that in metal.

Now I need to buy boring bars which are not exactly cheap for 5/8 shank. I do have a reducer to 3/8 I think so I'll look into that also.

 

[Blogwitch]

N,

You can turn up more reducers yourself to get you down to smaller sizes. I use 1/8" & 3mm shanks on some of my special boring tools.
Just remember, you can use lathe boring tipped tools in your boring head if you so wish, you just need to turn up a sleeve to get from boring tool size to boring head hole. I have one that is 10" long for really deep stuff but I have the advantage of a right angle head which allows me to bore horizontally.

Isn't it nice knowing that you can bore a hole and face off exactly square to it?

Now you seem to have grasped everything, good luck on your progress.

John