# Using the lathe face plate , dogs & turning between centres.



## Round in circles (Sep 12, 2014)

Would some of the more experienced guys be willing to help build this thread ?
 I've had a search in the index and can't find much out about using the face plate to turn larger than the chuck jaws pieces, nor can I find much about turning between centres using face plate & dog.

 Have any of you made special parts to enable face plate or dog turning , do you have any pictures ?


 I have an exercise that involves two sets of bolting two 200 mm lg  x 50 mm square blocks of aluminium bar together with a thin spacer in the middle and turning out two 1& 1/4 inch through holes on the same face ( to clamp two thick wall aluminium tubes in position eventually ) the spacer is to allow me some clamping distance without crushing or nipping the tube too tight once the holes are turned and the spacer is removed.


I'll have to use the face plate for it & am looking for ideas as to what you guys use to make the clamping plates etc to secure large things like this to the face plate.


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## francist (Sep 12, 2014)

I'm not exactly more experienced, but there is some good info on this in the South Bend How to Run a Lathe. Might give you some ideas until somebody else can give better advice.

-frank


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## John Hasler (Sep 12, 2014)

francist said:


> I'm not exactly more experienced, but there is some good info on this in the South Bend How to Run a Lathe. Might give you some ideas until somebody else can give better advice.
> 
> -frank



That book really lives up to its name.


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## Round in circles (Sep 12, 2014)

Thanks for the pictures , they are of immense value to me .   I now have a better idea of how I may clamp my bits so I don't tear the boring bar & tool post out :lmao: .


I must confess that when I'd enlarged the picture & read as much as I could see , I realized that I'd failed to consider balancing the face plate once the work was securely clamped up.


So it looks like I'll have to turn up five or six 2x 1" thick steel balance washers with a small hole and also several shouldered plate anchoring nuts &  bolt them where needed after taking the drive belt off the spindle to find the balance  .


All I need  to get this project thing of the ground ,up & running is for the aluminium stock to arrive .. told it's on the way and this afternoon  I get an email saying, "Sorry it's out of stock , we can supply a bigger size of 2& 1/2 " square bar  , do you want it ?"  .  I've  replied , " Yes,  if it is at the same price " .


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## stupoty (Sep 12, 2014)

Page 54 shows a basic diagram of a wiggle stick for locating punch marks 

https://archive.org/stream/firstyearlawork00workgoog#page/n56/mode/2up

archive.org has lots of free books (old out of print but still quite relevant 

Stuart


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## Round in circles (Sep 13, 2014)

Thanks for the mechanical indicator info , I'm going to go another way on that one 

I've just been out bid on a cheap red laser pointer , will get one and mount it in a purpose made mild steel taper in the tail stock  then   to check rough alignment close the jaws on a pin vice chuck set in the lathe headstock chuck the centre pint of the pin vice is exactly that ...... a fraction of a millimetre in dia .a
I will make any micro adjustments on the laser body by judicious use of a two pound engineers ball peine hammer :lmao:

 Back to eBay


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## stupoty (Sep 13, 2014)

Round in circles said:


> Thanks for the mechanical indicator info , I'm going to go another way on that one
> 
> I've just been out bid on a cheap red laser pointer , will get one and mount it in a purpose made mild steel taper in the tail stock  then   to check rough alignment close the jaws on a pin vice chuck set in the lathe headstock chuck the centre pint of the pin vice is exactly that ...... a fraction of a millimetre in dia .a
> I will make any micro adjustments on the laser body by judicious use of a two pound engineers ball peine hammer :lmao:
> ...



Laser pointer with a nice sharp dot could be quite handy,  i missed an awesome optical centre finder on ebay a while ago, it was a little telescope with cross hairs that fitted in a morse taper.

Stuart


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## Round in circles (Sep 15, 2014)

Had a play at making a Morse type taper on a bit of bar and counter bored the other end to take a mini laser holder .
Excited as heck putting it together and placing it in the saddle ram ..... only to find that the beam comes out the device at about 1.5 inches 35 mm out of true over 15 inches and because I'd bored the hole as a sliding fit , I could not get it aligned.


 Re drilled 1 mm bigger in barely enough metal  & tapped bored out the pointer end with three  x 5 mm engineers Allen key cap screws hoping to make a it  point adjuster system.  
Still not quite  enough movement , no more meat to play with at that end   , so  I played at doing the taper on the opposite end a bit better & learnt a few things.
It's not as easy as the books say , unless you have the tools to set the taper accurately ( will have to sleep on that and work out how to accurately  transpose 1/8 " Morse  taper per foot  on to a four inch long section of the new to be made  quill  .
 USA tooling that came with my lathe appears to have a different taper to a Morse taper ( OK I might have got the taper angle wrong  :lmao

This morning  I got six brand new nine inch long full threaded 12 mm coach bolts , the square coach bit shoulder fits in the channels of the face place brilliantly ...no need  for chunky "T" nuts . I'll have to cut the bolts to a shorter length once the newly  ordered ally bar arrives . 

Today is the last day I can play for a while , for I have to sort the caravan out for a500 or so mile round trip to a wedding that kicks off Thursday morning and ends when we get back home on Sunday evening .

So , for this afternoon I hope to turn some 30 mm hex bar off centre or on a flat to make shoulders in  several 60 mm long sections and then bore out the centre to 12.5 mm  If i make the step 10 mm wide  20 mm down from the top I'll have a useful clamp bracket that can sit on several different sizes and only need one nut &  bolt to secure it


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## benmychree (Sep 15, 2014)

Best and simplest device for centering to a punch mark in the lathe is a 60 deg pointed sleeve with concentric outer diameter drilled and reamed in the non pointed end that snugly but freely fits a smaller diameter rod perhaps half the diameter of the larger rod and has a female center drilled in it's back end.  A stiff spring fits in the hold in the sleeve and bears against the end of the smaller rod; the center hole is fit over the lathe tailstock center and tensioned as necessary, a dial indicator is held against the sleeve as close as possible to the center point that is resting against the workpiece and the spindle rotated, showing the amount of offset.  As far as the length of these parts, for mine, which is sized for 14" plus lathes, the sleeve is 3/4" dia and 6 1/2" long and drilled and reamed 3 1'2" deep; the rod that fits inside is 3/8" dia and 11 1/2" long drill rodthe spring is 1 1/2" long and .045 wire size.  
The prototype was made at the Mare Island Naval Shipyard.  For smaller lathes, of course it can be made to roughly the same proportions, but smaller to suit  your machine.  One nice thing about this is that the spring tension temds to hold the work against the faceplate while one fiddles around trying to locate and attach it to the plate.


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## aametalmaster (Sep 15, 2014)

I have some face plate pics from when i made my ball turner..Bob


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## Round in circles (Sep 15, 2014)

Ben, 
thanks for that , I can imagine the device you describe .   I did have a bit of a fiddle chucking up the four jaw chuck to turn a face off centre on some 1.25 " hex bars , any chance of a picture or hand drawn sketch ?

I was thinking of using the chuck fitted with a bar turned to a point  to trap things in place but the sliding piston & spring idea sound even better .  Especially if the bar is scalloped out over an inch or so , so you can slip a pin in the rod to retain the piston permanently .

I had a lapse this afternoon & evening and went back to making the holder for the laser pointer. 

It works well , has six alignment screws as two sets of evenly spaced alignment adjuster (three ) screws at the back and 60 degrees out of this alignment 25 mm forward of the back ones at the front is another set of three alignment screws . I played for about 2 minutes set it up  but the beam was still half way up the chuck , judicious application of a lump of wood soon solved this little problem . The 1 mm laser spot now shines in the pinhole where the precision ground chuck jaws meet . 
I took it out the tail stock , rotated it 180 degree  and shoved it back , it's still in perfect alignment .

 I spent the last hour chucking up the hex bar for the off centre turning of my face plate clamping  devices and actually managed to chip off the first 1/4 inch some 10 mm deep having set the back gear & spindles  up to give me about one rev per 1 . 5 seconds .


 This face plate exercise is starting to come together , I  can't wait to get back to it all after the weekend .

Piccies to follow tomorrow hopefully showing disasters 1,2 & 3 then the final modified solution.


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## Round in circles (Sep 15, 2014)

Bob.
Thanks for the ball turning device  pictures , I'll bet that I'm not the only one to have a good think about  that one , can you put up a picture of the finished item please ?


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## 12bolts (Sep 15, 2014)

Round in circles said:


> ....... I realized that I'd failed to consider balancing the face plate once the work was securely clamped up.......



Balancing is not always required. Depending on the size of your faceplate, (flywheel effect), weight of your workpiece, size of the lathe, and rpms, you can get away without counterweighting.

Cheers Phil


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## aametalmaster (Sep 15, 2014)

A few ball turner pics. I do have better ones someplace...Bob


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## Round in circles (Sep 16, 2014)

Lovely stuff thanks ,

But that's cheating  :lmao:      ..........,  Having the slide arrangement with keyways  at 90 degrees axially ...   did you make that yourself or cannibalize & " adjust" a bit of old kit off an old lathe etc.?


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## aametalmaster (Sep 16, 2014)

Round in circles said:


> Lovely stuff thanks ,
> 
> But that's cheating  :lmao:      ..........,  Having the slide arrangement with keyways  at 90 degrees axially ...   did you make that yourself or cannibalize & " adjust" a bit of old kit off an old lathe etc.?



I made all the parts from plans in a 1962 Popular Science Mag. The plans said it would do a 3" ball so i had to give it a go. Yup it will. The compound is off my lathe. It just removes and slips on that plate with the 2 holes. So really you just make a post that fits into the compound hole. A tapered brass bushing and some pins for it. The plate and a handle and drill and tap a few holes. I have all the drawings and the article which is 5 pages...Bob
http://books.google.com/books?id=wC...6AEwAzgK#v=onepage&q=south bend lathe&f=false


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## benmychree (Sep 17, 2014)

aametalmaster said:


> I made all the parts from plans in a 1962 Popular Science Mag. The plans said it would do a 3" ball so i had to give it a go. Yup it will. The compound is off my lathe. It just removes and slips on that plate with the 2 holes. So really you just make a post that fits into the compound hole. A tapered brass bushing and some pins for it. The plate and a handle and drill and tap a few holes. I have all the drawings and the article which is 5 pages...Bob
> http://books.google.com/books?id=wC...6AEwAzgK#v=onepage&q=south bend lathe&f=false



I worked on making parts for one of these in 1963 in my machine shop class in high school , did not know where the plans came from --- It was quite a nice attachment and easy to set up and use.


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## benmychree (Sep 17, 2014)

I am trying to attach a drawing of the centering device that I spoke earlier about; The device is intended for 14" and larger lathes, but can, of course be scaled down for smaller lathes.


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## benmychree (Sep 17, 2014)

aametalmaster said:


> I made all the parts from plans in a 1962 Popular Science Mag. The plans said it would do a 3" ball so i had to give it a go. Yup it will. The compound is off my lathe. It just removes and slips on that plate with the 2 holes. So really you just make a post that fits into the compound hole. A tapered brass bushing and some pins for it. The plate and a handle and drill and tap a few holes. I have all the drawings and the article which is 5 pages...Bob
> http://books.google.com/books?id=wC...6AEwAzgK#v=onepage&q=south bend lathe&f=false




Did you find a way to print out the drawings from the magazine article?  It seems that Google has done it's best to make it difficult to accomplish.


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## aametalmaster (Sep 20, 2014)

benmychree said:


> Did you find a way to print out the drawings from the magazine article?  It seems that Google has done it's best to make it difficult to accomplish.



Yup. Took pics of them years ago. Easier to read...Bob


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