Problem: I don’t own a mill. Several months ago I scored a milling attachment for a South Bend 16” lathe, figuring I could do what it takes to make it fit my 14-1/2. It mounts in lieu of the compound, and the SB16 has a couple of threaded holes to a cross-slide adapter or to the cross slide itself. This one was modified to fit some other lathe and has a big hole in the middle of rotation that isn’t original. I thought I’d make an adapter to fit that hole and provide the round dovetail used by the 14-1/2 compound.
But I don’t want to mount it at that location. I want it closer to the back so that the cross slide range gives me access to everything in the milling attachment vise jaws. So I decided to machine a dovetail mount like the one on the compound, and the put it wherever it needed to be on the bottom of the milling attachment. I’ll do that with probably two grade 8 3/8-16 screws plus a couple of alignment pins.
This post is about machining the dovetail.
I’m a noob, so I made some rookie mistakes. The resulting workpiece that I picture is the second one. (The first one turned out fine except the dovetail is backwards—2.5 (nominal) minus 2 is one half, which means a quarter inch on each side. Not a half inch. Dumbass mistake.)
I measured up the dovetail on the bottom of the compound. Here’s the sketch. It’s upside down—the dovetail slopes in towards the top, so that the lock screws pull it down against the cross slide.
I had a 3” bar of 12L14, and I first faced it off. I’m using the fat side of a CNMG insert for facing.
And then I turned it down to 2.497”.
I’m using a CNMG insert for turning, running about 250 RPMs. The feed rate was .005 per revolution, and the depth of cut was .020. (The lathe wasn’t happy with .030, which tells me something’s not right. I still need to rewire the single-phase motor for 240VAC. The power level seems low. It’s not the bearings in the lathe power train, which run free and are in spec.)
After getting the correct diameter, I used a cut-off tool to undercut the narrow part of the dovetail. I made sure the dovetail was oriented so that the face I just cut to be against the bottom of the milling attachment. I wanted all reference surfaces machined in one setup.
I used a VNMG tool to cut the dovetail, with the compound at the 24.8 degrees of the part I was copying, sweeping across the corner and manually feeding the compound. I took .020 cuts by feeding in the cross slide. That worked pretty well. I also used it to clean up the flat surface.
Then I measured over an extra .050 and used a cutoff tool to part it off. I had to slow it down, running at 60 RPMs in the back gear. I manually feed the tool. Halfway through the insert broke and the shards buggered up the cut. Lots of chatter. I locked the carriage between two micrometer stops, and lined up the compound to be straight on so that if it walked it wouldn’t be a problem. Results were ugly but i was going to face off the part anyway.
I turned it around in the chuck and indicated it in as best I could. And it was good enough—that face of the dovetail is not a reference surface but I still bumped it to well within a thousandth of being parallel to the other face.
I then finished the facing down to the .949 target thickness. The dimension wasn’t critical but I was trying to hit it anyway.
My regular mic wouldn’t fit behind the part and stay square. But I had recently bought a cheapie import tubing wall thickness mic from Shars, and that was what I needed I fit in the space between the part and the chuck body.
After chamfering and deburring, I measured the part with my good older Fowler mics that I bought maybe 20 years ago when they were made in Japan. The diameter is a thou and an half over, which will mean a closer fit, the thickness is within a couple of tenths, and the dovetail dimension is within 3 thousandths.
At this stage of my learning, hitting dimensions reasonably well is a good outcome.
Next step is to install it on the bottom of the milling attachment at an appropriate spot. My worry is that this is too small a mount for that 75-pound milling attachment, but time will tell. I plan to use two or three 3/8-16 grade 8 screws (tight!) and a couple of dowel pins.
Rick “4-day weekend over” Denney