# SB 10L tail stock spindle base rework and shimming



## Pacer (Sep 3, 2011)

As with the rest of my 1944 single lever 10L, the tail stock had a good bit of wear, from the lathe way contact up to the spindle screw & threads. I will try and describe how I cleaned up and shimmed the base to bring the tail stock in line with the head stock. At this point, I still had to rebuild the spindle - the screw and threads were very sloppy. (we had the spindle in locked mode for all this fitting, reading off a hardened dead center in the taper) I will make another post on the repair of the spindle screw and threads.

This is the base as it started out, with some pretty good wear patterns where it contacted the ways.




Here I am setting up to fly cut the worn flat side of the plate to get a smooth surface all over and keep track of how much I'll remove (as best as I can) so I can remove the same amount from the V side of the plate.




Then carefully do a re-set of the plate to clean up the V part of the base.




Here we have cleaned up all the marks on the 2 way contact points, leveled the lathe, and are checking the fit with the level and bluing.




The bluing pointed out some high spots, but wasnt too bad, so a little scraping brought the plate in to make a good contact all around,




Once the plate was riding the ways nicely, it was time to set the tail stock casting/spindle on the plate and bring it in line with the head stock with shimming. We first set the cross screws to get center of the spindle, then started trying the different thickness of shims to determine the up/down setting, this was a fiddly, time consuming process, cutting and trying about a half dozen combinations of single and multiple thickness shims. After about an hour or so we hit on .012 all around for the magic number.




We used this rather long set up on the indicator to get a reading at about the mid point of the wear on the 4-1/2' bed ways, hoping to get a sort of "in-between" point. As is typical, my bed has the most wear near the chuck.


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