Hello
Its quite easy really. The first thing you need to remember is you are required to turn on centres.
You will be offsetting the work piece, so the chuck end will need to be on a dead centre with a drive dog to drive the work piece. You can also just chuck up a piece of scrap , face it off, and spot drill, and use a steel ball as you would on the tailstock end. The next thing you will need is a boring head that has a arbour that fits your tailstock.
Most boring heads have different types available. In your case, Busy-Bee Tools has them for under 20 bucks. I have the R-8 to use in the mill, and the M/T for mounting the BH in the lathes tailstock.
Now that you have a boring head in the tailstock, and a centre in the chuck end with a dog leg, means to drive the work, your almost there. You will also need to turn a piece of round stock to fit your boring head. This just needs to fit into the boring head, and have a the other end spot drilled. You don't need to turn a centre for the boring head, as your going to be offsetting your work piece, you use a small ball, that fits into your BH part you made, and the work piece. This allows you to offset your work a fair bit, and still have good contact with the ball in the end, as opposed to a point of the centre.
To set up, I just position the BH in the tailstock so I can drop a level over the flat. The only thing to remember to rotate the tailstock barrel in the direction the chuck will be turning to take up any play when your leveling your BH.
Now you have a way to offset your work piece, you can use your carriage feed to cut tapers as long as you need. With a BH, you can make very fine ajustments that are sometimes hard to achieve even with a taper attachment.
Even when your trying to copy a M/T for instance, you can mount a known good M/T in your centres, run a indicator across it, ajust the offset to zero it out. At this point you can swap over to your work piece, and duplicate the taper. Being your work piece is on centres, you can remove the piece to check fit without the worry of inducing runout.
Even though I have a taper attachment on my big Sidney lathe that can cut 2-ft long tapers, I still find myself reaching for the boring head 9 times out of 10.
Though some guys will elect to offset the tailstock,some will even use the compound to cut tapers, and that works too, only if you have enough travel to do so. Problem with that is compounds don't have a feed, and getting a good finish can be challenging. I rather use the boring head because you don't disturb the TS setting, and the BH give you the fine ajustments too.
The steel balls you can salvage from old bearings, I have several sizes for different size jobs. I also use my boring head to turn balls on the lathe. I just bought another arbour, and turned it straight to fit a boring bar holder for a QCTP. Make a handle for the arbour, and your all set. Bore on the mill, offset work for tapers, and turn balls on your lathe.
Multi Task those tools Guys!
