Some pictures from my shop

[dparker]

Marv: You did it to me again---I saw your tooling and just had to make something like it.

I already had the plate to go on the tailstock ram but was never satisfied with how to mount my magnetic base dial indicator and ended up with it on the carriage or some other flimsy setup. When I saw your dial indicator mounted on the tailstock casting I started to think of how I could do that on the round casting on my lathe. I ended up using a "General" mag base that I had set up to hold a deflector that I rarely used and it sits quite securely on the round casting, made a indicator mount out of some aluminum angle and it looks like it will work nicely.

With all the talk about collets I made a holder above my lathe out of PVC pipe and used a #3 morse taper reamer to make them seat securely. I ended up hot gun glueing the PVC to the angle iron. A spindle thread cover for safety is at the right of the rack with a roll pin to insert in one of the holes if it becomes too tight on the threads to undo by hand.

At this rate of trying to adapt your ideas on tooling to use on my machines I may never get more engines built. Keep showing your special tooling, I really like your ideas and ingenuity of solving some of the little problems that seem to keep coming up.
Thank You--but alas I'm beginning to need more tool boxes---don

 

[mklotz]

Don,

Good job on the TS mount. In retrospect, I should have said more about what to do if one has a TS with a rounded top. Your General mag base is a fine solution. Many discount houses sell knock offs of that style but, if you can't find one, another solution is to simply glue two supermagnets to two plates of steel such that the plates project outward - visualize the letter 'H' where the crossbar is the magnet(s) and the uprights are the steel plates. A friend of mine built a fixture like that to hold a level on round pipe. A magnet from a junked disk drive should work just fine.

A spindle thread cover is an excellent female threading project for the novice who wants to practice threading before committing to an expensive piece like a faceplate or chuck backplate. When I was first starting out I wanted to make a collet chuck which would thread on my spindle. Since that was my first attempt at single point threading, my learning path went thusly:

1. Make copy of lathe spindle threads - test while cutting with existing faceplate.
2. Make spindle thread cover to practice female threading - test with male thread piece made in step 1.
3. Make collet chuck - test threads with piece made in step 1.

When I was done, I had three useful items - the collet chuck, the spindle thread cover and the chunk of male threaded stock. The latter was made long enough that I could hack off a length and screw it to a steel bar. Said steel bar is then bolted to the rotary table when I want to mount the chuck to the table. The remainder of the chunk is still my thread gage for making stuff that threads on the spindle. It's really satisfying when your learning pieces can all be put to practical use.

If you haven't already, look back through some of my earlier posts made when I first joined the forum. I documented a whole collection of "quick and dirty" solutions to common shop problems.