A little feed slop is necessary for the feed screw to not bind.
The standard way to deal with it is to always back out farther than
necessary, then advance to the desired position - the slop is
eliminated during the excess advance travel.
Sounds like you may have adjusted the gibs to a slight taper. The
adjusment goes quicker if you loosen the 2 outer screws and set the
middle one for comfortable movement near the center of travel. Next,
adjust one of the outer screws for comfortable movement with the
cross slide over it; then do the other screw. If you can't get
uniform comfortable movement, it's possible that one of the dovetail
surface is slightly out of parallel, lapping will fix it.
Roy
--- In 7x12minilathe@..., "bt99ss <Thvin@a...>"
<Thvin@a...> wrote:
Hello everybody,
I'm another lucky person who got a mini-lathe for Christmas and I'm
having a great time with it. I'm new to metal turning but I've
been
to both Mini-Lathe.Com and The Little Machine Shop sites and would
like to thank both for the info. I've been "dailing" the machine
in
acording to book and the other info, but have a question. The
compound feed has about .004 slop in the in and out feed. Is there
a
way to adjust, or shim this out? My second question is while
adjusting the cross slide feed (three allens) I'm able to take all
the slop out when is all the way out, but when I move it "in" it
picks up some (about .002) slop. I've played around with the
allens,
but when I move the cross slide back out it gets really tight.
I've
only adjusted (not lapped the jibs). Does anybody have any
suggestions?
Thanks for the help.
Tom Vincent
