- Joined
- Mar 2, 2018
- Messages
- 232
I've talked about this bits and pieces in other places, and still don't have a plan, so I thought I'd start a thread here.
I wanted to try turning between centers, so I bought some factory dogs from Grizzly. They didn't remotely work. Elsewhere, someone pointed out that a drive plate is a different animal from a faceplate. Here is a picture of an example of a real drive plate, posted by darkzero:
My original faceplate was pretty bad anyway. The first time I put it on, I had to face off an alarming amount of material to get it flat, and it still doesn't run true about the axis of the casting. Somebody was drunk that day. Anyway, I bought a replacement to use whenever I actually want to bolt something to a faceplate, and I machined one of the slots in my wonky one to accept all the sizes of dogs I had. I also took the slots closer to the inside and outside edges.
I'm not going to swap everything around to take a picture, but what I ended up with looked a bit like this, except with my own redneck version of a dedicated drive plate. (Picture also by darkzero.):
In my case, it's probably a lot worse than that. The dogs are missing the plate by a mile, or at least a good inch or two.
Possible solutions:
Buy a real drive plate to fit this lathe. I went looking, and didn't find anything promising. I didn't find anything for sale that looked anything like darkzero's pictures, actually.
Extend the legs on the dogs, or make new dogs. While thinking about that, I ran across a comment in some other thread, where someone pointed out that factory dogs are all smooth and round, and this can be the difference between bruised knuckles and sticking your hand into a blender full of bailing wire. That was a good quote. I can't find who said that, or I'd give proper credit. Anyway, valid point. Making nice dogs that have all the pointy parts eased would take a lot of time. Plus I already have a bunch of dogs that would work perfectly fine if I had any way to drive the things.
Extend the reach of the plate itself. I thought about fabricating some kind of rigid extension out of angle iron or something. This seems like a potentially lethal accessory though.
Buy a big hunk of cast iron, and pay some guy with a much better shop to make me a drive plate. I've seen Atombomb76 or whatever his name is make one from scratch. I bet that didn't come cheap though.
Source a 4MT center that's shorter. It looks like these things cost upwards of $75 though.
Finally, since this is basically the only use I can see for the center I have, I could spend an entire afternoon whittling it down.
Anyway, lots of head scratching. I've put some thought into this, and still don't have a good plan. I feel like I can't be the only person who ever tried to turn between centers on a g0602, and I'm ready to say I give up. I'm ready to quit guessing, and just let somebody tell me the answer now. I figure there just has to be an easier answer, and I'm just overthinking and making life too complicated again.
I wanted to try turning between centers, so I bought some factory dogs from Grizzly. They didn't remotely work. Elsewhere, someone pointed out that a drive plate is a different animal from a faceplate. Here is a picture of an example of a real drive plate, posted by darkzero:
My original faceplate was pretty bad anyway. The first time I put it on, I had to face off an alarming amount of material to get it flat, and it still doesn't run true about the axis of the casting. Somebody was drunk that day. Anyway, I bought a replacement to use whenever I actually want to bolt something to a faceplate, and I machined one of the slots in my wonky one to accept all the sizes of dogs I had. I also took the slots closer to the inside and outside edges.
I'm not going to swap everything around to take a picture, but what I ended up with looked a bit like this, except with my own redneck version of a dedicated drive plate. (Picture also by darkzero.):
In my case, it's probably a lot worse than that. The dogs are missing the plate by a mile, or at least a good inch or two.
Possible solutions:
Buy a real drive plate to fit this lathe. I went looking, and didn't find anything promising. I didn't find anything for sale that looked anything like darkzero's pictures, actually.
Extend the legs on the dogs, or make new dogs. While thinking about that, I ran across a comment in some other thread, where someone pointed out that factory dogs are all smooth and round, and this can be the difference between bruised knuckles and sticking your hand into a blender full of bailing wire. That was a good quote. I can't find who said that, or I'd give proper credit. Anyway, valid point. Making nice dogs that have all the pointy parts eased would take a lot of time. Plus I already have a bunch of dogs that would work perfectly fine if I had any way to drive the things.
Extend the reach of the plate itself. I thought about fabricating some kind of rigid extension out of angle iron or something. This seems like a potentially lethal accessory though.
Buy a big hunk of cast iron, and pay some guy with a much better shop to make me a drive plate. I've seen Atombomb76 or whatever his name is make one from scratch. I bet that didn't come cheap though.
Source a 4MT center that's shorter. It looks like these things cost upwards of $75 though.
Finally, since this is basically the only use I can see for the center I have, I could spend an entire afternoon whittling it down.
Anyway, lots of head scratching. I've put some thought into this, and still don't have a good plan. I feel like I can't be the only person who ever tried to turn between centers on a g0602, and I'm ready to say I give up. I'm ready to quit guessing, and just let somebody tell me the answer now. I figure there just has to be an easier answer, and I'm just overthinking and making life too complicated again.