Little mods making things better. (And other Stuff!)

Looks like it works!
 
I did a test cut and my 3/8" round bar was not HSS and just bent over real quick. Gonna have try and find a piece of 3/8" HSS round bar stock to make a tool cutter. I measured the distance of my jig and the smallest sphere I can make will be 1" and I guess that is just about right for my uses. Might "maybe" could buy a couple of the round carbide inserts and adapt that to my tool cutter but that will mean my spheres will be larger than 1" to facilitate the round cutter on the tools' end.
 
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Added a pointer to my cross slide hand dial. Not very accurate but it almost looks important! LoL
 

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Weldingrod1 said:
Hoooley C#%^!
That's an amazing change!

Sent from my SM-G892A using Tapatalk
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Well if you think that cool check out this South Bend 9A I did last year.
 

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Where did that go? I think you and me are the only people on Earth that had something other than an Atlas lathe, and kept the Atlas. Lol
 
jwmay said:
Where did that go? I think you and me are the only people on Earth that had something other than an Atlas lathe, and kept the Atlas. Lol
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About three months ago I sold the South Bend and have been regretting it ever since. You can do so much more with a 9" lathe with the gear change box and larger spindle hole and chuck. The guy that bought it never even put it on a stand yet. It's just been sitting on his garage floor. I think I got all the bugs worked out of my Craftsman 6" and it has been working very well. Just don't like the small spindle and small chuck but as they say, "It is what it is!"
 
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Yeah I'm pretty sure my beloved Grizzly lathe is rusting away inside an unheated machine shed, having not been run since two years before I sold it. The good news is that that machine will make someone very happy in thirty years when they find its practically brand new except for the rust.
 
jwmay said:
Where did that go? I think you and me are the only people on Earth that had something other than an Atlas lathe, and kept the Atlas. Lol
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If Atlas/Craftsman counts, count me in.
 
LX Kid said:
You may be right. Looking at his finished "spheres" they don't look like round balls. The raw stock has to be threaded in order to make the cut. I "think" by using the compound it will cause the threaded hole to move from the desired 90 degree. Seems you have to use cross slide adjustments to make a round ball.

Update: I just reviewed the video again and he "is" turning the cross slide and not the compound. I wonder what degree he ground his tool at??? Could be a two facet grind on the tool.
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The balls will be spherical as long as the cutter rotation axis intersects the spindle axis. The center of the ball will be at that intersection. It appears to me that the cutter is ground to a simple bevel. This would give it an elliptical cutting edge.

A variation on this has been made by a number of forum members using a boring head. The advantage of that is that it gives fine control of the ball diameter. A few years back, there were some boring heads being sold on e-bay at ridiculously low prices and there was a rush to scoop them up.
 
LX Kid said:
Just did a test cut over 5.5"length. At the chuck my mic is telling me it's cutting deeper by about.0035" at the chuck than at the tailstock. What if I offset the tailstock by .003" so that more material is cut at the tailstock to match the chuck measurement? And just left it that way. Inquiring minds want to know!
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Update: 1/31/22 I moved the tailstock towards the back by about 1/32", didn't think to use dial gage, and did a test cut of 5" bar stock. I now have .0005" - .001" difference between the chuck and the tailstock. I think I'll just leave it alone! For what it's worth I've been getting really decent cuts and attribute it to making the cross slide and compound gibs tight. Tightening, not locking, the cross slide lock for cutting really cuts down on vibration as well. Machine is really quiet after specing out the gears and their adjustment as well as using clear chain lube on the gears.
 
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