And some days you hit it on the mark.??

I spent the last few weeks remaking the above compound dovetail at the correct height so that I don't have to adjust the QCTP holders if I change from this new compound over to a solid pedestal or if I even remove the MLA cross slide and go all the way back to Atlas stock cross slide and compound.

I learned some stuff again.? Probably things y'all already know.
On the first go around (above), I used my mill mostly. It has some parallelism issues and the horizontal mill cutters were dull.? Noisy.? SWMBO complained.

I decided to try the 4 jaw chuck on the Atlas to face the stock down to thickness this time.? This worked great.? Nice flat surface and good finish.
However, the chuck was old and worn so when I flipped the stock over to make a parallel cut, it was not so good.
After trying all sorts of make-ready and shims that did not work I decided to do the trick Joe Pie showed in a YouTube.

I drilled and tapped holes in the chuck, mounted some aluminum cylinders and turned them flat.



The next pass with the cutter on the raw stock gave me parallel under 0.001.????? Yawsa!



I took light cuts because of the interrupted cuts.? Initially I was running in back gear but that made a lot of noise and the back gear handle wanted to pop out.? I wound up changing the belting arrangement to the slowest I could run without back gear and that was a lot better.? Coincidentally not much of a speed change from where I was in back gear.

So those two things are what I learned about my lathe and its capabilities.

The rest was on the mill.? Cutting light and slow.? Many passes, many measurement checks.? A few paper shims to get parallelism perfect.
Nailed it.




In the below image, you can see one of the mistakes I fixed from before.? I had made the dovetail way too narrow and the gib tilted all wonky.
This time you can see the good gib fit.? The slide is butter smooth with the gib tighter than I have ever had it before.
I can yank on the QCTP hard and not see any oil gapping at the compound slide interface.
Solid pedestal is in the pic just for visual height comparison.



Happy........