Making A Dovetail Slide

I made a tool.to cut tapers ten years ago. And I used dovetailed pieces like that. I used dowels to lock them in place. My Logan has a production cross slide on it and the tool I made is like compound slide kind of like a sine bar. It has about 5 or 6 inches of travel and I used a piece of allthread for a leadscrew. With the tool I have cut tapered tooling for my Logan and Rockwell lathes. I made the tool so that after I have cut the taper I want , I drill and ream a hole thru both the bottom and top plate
Then mark the hole so that if I need that taper again I just pin the marked hole and I can recut that taper again. So I have marked the Logan taper and the Rockwell taper and the Morse tapers. If you want to see tool google Jimsehrs taper slide tool.
Jimsehr
 
Tony Wells said:
Once you have everything aligned and moving as you want, I'd recommend a couple of dowel pins on each side to ensure that they don't move relative to each other or the base plate. This would better simulate machining it from a solid piece. Take the time to polish by lapping the bearing surfaces and then either flake it or cut some oil grooves in it, not the moving part, but the fixed part. On the side that will get the gib, put the oil grooves in the contact side of the gib, and drill through some oil holes that break into the oil grooves. You must find a way to keep a film of oil in the contact areas.
Click to expand...

On the Clarkson tool and cutter grinder there is no means to oil the sliding surfaces at all. One of the reasons they did this is because the oiled surface attracts the grinding dust. I have a clarkson grinder from the early 70's and despite the leadscrew having some slop, the sliding surfaces are still ok. It was assumed that the cast iron would be lubricitous enough that oil would not be needed. I know that oil is always better but in this application the engineers chose against having oiled surfaces. I would probably opt for a dry lubricant on a tool and cutter grinder if given the choice.

On a lathe cross slide I would certainly opt for having the solution you mentioned. I would just make sure that the flaking and the oil grooves were on the under side to ensure no swarf or cast iron dust would ever get caught and create lapping compund.

Paul.
 
Industrial grinders and surface grinders have oiled ways and/or rollers for longer life with much more table motion than tool and cutter grinders. They often use fairly elaborate and multiple means to try to keep the grit out of the oil.
 
Even my K O Lee tool & cutter grinder has oil lubricated ways on it. The ways are covered very good to keep most grinding dust out. The cross feed and elevation screws are trashed from the lack of lubrication and collection of grinding dust to wear them out.
 
I'm currently working on a Delta Milwaukee grinder that was so abused I've had to machine 6 to 12 thousanths from the way surfaces prior to scraping.
The screws and nuts are troubled or trashed...........
Had the prior owners kept the machine properly clean and lubricated IE "followed the instructions" it would have been a different story.
The base is too big for me to machine so I've had to scrape about 6 thousanths to get below the scores.
Now I notice how the cast iron on cast iron with just blue for lube, slide better as I increase the contact area.
Will have to make a hand plane to cut the slide surfaces true as I don't have machine capacity for them.
That means a tool that will need rigidity and a couple of dovetails.
It's interesting and helpful to see how others deal with design.
 
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