My own Grizzly DF-1237G setup/restoration thread

[TonyBen]

Nez, I at least need to get small enough to make a rear pillar. 1/2 to 1/4 would be fine. Was thinking it would be convenient to trim connector pins but I don’t have to have it. Gotta trim piston tails too.

Tony.

 

[Bamban]

For those items you mentioned, the collet system would probably your best bet. The ER40 is adjustable that you can dial the gas piston before cutting on the tail.

For barrels, later on just make a simple front spider. Here is what I built initially for my Jet 1024 with threaded spindle. The spider itself is sold at Grizzly.com, cheap like around 32 bucks. Later on, Akajun, a shooting buddy from the Cajun land and a member here, made one for me from steel stock. Bolted it to the same faceplate I initially used. Or, if your spindle has threaded nose,you can make a direct thread on spider, last picture.

 

[Bamban]

To complement the front spider, you need to make a simple outboard spider. I use finger clamps with ball bearings front and back to allow the barrel to pivot as I dial the barrel bore.

 

[Richard King 2]

After you level the machine (I like your leveling pads) chuck up a piece of aluminum round stock bigger then the tailstock quill and turn it down to the same size of the quill OD and then move the TS up to the turned piece...oh cut approx. 3" long. Then mount a mag base on the compound and indicate the HS bar and TS quill. Side first and align the side to side and then check the top of the 2 bars. Have the TS quill extended out and locked and TS locked to bed. That is the best way to check the height. Many sweep with an indicator and forget that the indicators or bar sags. You can also check the HS bar for taper. On Those Asian machines the headstock sits on a swivel pin and the head can be adjusted to cut straight. I have cut the HS bar using the 2 collar test as you can see in the pictures.

 

[TonyBen]

Step 1. I leveled the lathe today. Never done this to a lathe and had to look at a couple of videos to do it.
At the headstock..

Somewhere around the middle of travel...

At the tailstock end...

Is that good enough?

Tony.

 

[Richard King 2]

It looks good. A simpler way and better way IMHO is. to set the levels on top of the flat cross-slide and check it again. When you use the cross-slide no need for the V blocks and no need to pick up the level. It will follow the tool path too. That bubble level is .005 /12" per graduation.

 

[Dabbler]

To align your tailstock, you just can't beat Stefan Gottewinter's method shown in this video: He directly reads the value in Z (bu7t you can also read in Y just as easily - mine was .002 high in Y.

 

[Richard King 2]

I showed Stefan to do it that way. He has been in 2 of my classes. I need to tell my students to teach, but please give me some credit when they teach my methods! I just scolded him on his you tube channel for forgetting to mention who showed him how to do that.

 

[TonyBen]

It looks good. A simpler way and better way IMHO is. to set the levels on top of the flat cross-slide and check it again. When you use the cross-slide no need for the V blocks and no need to pick up the level. It will follow the tool path too. That bubble level is .005 /12" per graduation.

I had originally done it that way but thought it was too easy and there had to be more to it. I went looking for other methods and found the way I did it the second time, thinking that maybe the first was was inaccurate. I'll go back and re-level on the cross-slide. It won't be much effort. It's just tilted down on the working side. Shouldn't take me but 5 to 10 minutes of tweaking to get it back in that way.

 

[Richard King 2]

One other thing is to tap on the leveling pads with some leaded cold roll bar stock, to seat them on the floor. I hope I'm not coming off as a know it all here...but I have been leveling and aligning machines for 50 years and want to share before I croak. This is a bigger machine, but the principals are the same.
http://vintagemachinery.org/pubs/2104/3558.pdf