MACHINE SHOP TIPS #99 Aligning Lathe Centers TEST BAR METHOD tubalcain

howdy is tucane again before we begin the video let me tell you about a few of my favorite YouTubers and here they are these are some of the best machine shop and Shop videos that you'll find on YouTube and be sure and look them up and check out some of these videos of course after you have watched all of mine my for boy actually refers to a MyFord lathe which is made in England this Keith Fenner is absolutely fabulous a Craftsman a machinist welder and he gives excellent explanations on how to do things and his photography is great as well Shop dog Sam is quite a character he deals uh mainly with old engines and things like that but I think you really enjoy him if you haven't been watching him and train man is uh also a wonderful machinist and he builds locomotives and train related uh products but is an excellent machinist and explains things very well the subject of this video is tail stock alignment and I know I've done this before by some other methods and I probably beat the subject to death but if you'll bear with me I'm going to show you what amounts to my favorite method and probably the quickest method to do this and that's with the test bar the problem is that these test bars uh are very expensive they're 60$ 80 $100 on eBay and they have to be very accurate or you might as well not bother doing it all in an upcoming video if there's enough demand I'm going to show you how to make an accurate one but uh if it isn't uh if you can't make it real accurate don't bother because uh it's all is for not now your test bar doesn't have to be this long this is 12 in long and it's 1 in in diameter but the one I have on the lathe is 12 in long and 3/4 in diameter which is quite sufficient and this is made of drill Rod the rod must be perfectly straight and perfectly round so cold roll steel just isn't going to do the job many of these are ground on a cylindrical grinder but uh we have Center holes in each end and these are accurate Center holes and just sticking this in a Chuck on the lathe and drilling Center holes will not do the job so let's step back to the Atlas lathe and I'll show you how to do that but this can be done on any brand of lathes but I'm going to use the atlas Craftsman because there's an awful lot of those out in basement shops here we we are at the Atlas lathe looking toward the tail stck and the Joker is there looking at it too and all laths are made with their tail stocks in two pieces as indicated right here now in order to cut a taper one of the methods is the offset tail stock method which is to loosen up the set screws and move the top over one way or the other and that allows you to turn a taper but in in reality we are offer often turning uh taper inadvertently and from time to time you need to check your tail stock alignment to make sure that uh these little lines are truly in uh in alignment and that's just a a benchmark there it's not accurate enough just to uh go by that you really need to indicate it that that's good ballpark for General use but if you have an indic Ator and a test bar you need to do what I'm going to show you now now on a tail stock there's a set screw on each side this is a slotted set screw for a screwdriver I don't like that the other lays have uh socket heads for Allen wrench I went down to the hardware show today and you know the woman uh the bearded woman the lady with the mustache has retired and she's gone but there was a man with real bad breath and I had him look in those little drawers and they didn't have long enough screws these need to be about 2 in long but I guess I got sidetracked there a little bit but those are the two screws that you can work one against the other and move the top of the tail stock back and forth The Joker Is checking out this tail stck and what he sees here is that the index lines are way off so the first thing I'm going to do is H go back and set them together but that will not be accurate enough and then we'll start indicating in order to set these now make sure that the tail stock clamp that is what locks it to the bed is loose you cannot move it back and forth if you've got that locked I'm going to do that now and then I'll meet you uh over at the lathe using two stubby screwdrivers notice my hand in the back of the lathe and the other hand in the front I can move these back and forth against each other and bring it into alignment while I'm watching my indicator so that's what I'll be doing and that won't always be in the video but that is what I'm doing when the tail stck clamp is loose it is also very important that your centers are accurate and not damaged and you have cleaned out the bore with your fingers and a rag and and then tapped the sleeve and the center back in because if there's a chip in there or any other debris that causes uh the center to be slightly off then again you're doing no good here and the same thing on the tail stock be sure and clean out the quill and then install a good Center as far as indicator are concerned I do not favor this magnetic base one because it's kind of big and clumsy in the way but they certainly will work but uh if you can find a good place to uh to set it and it doesn't interfere with all the chips and gather chips but uh use this if you want uh this one has more range than what we need but I prefer a plunger type indicator that and I made this little uh holder just a piece of aluminum could steel and there's just hole in in there and I'll tighten that down we don't have a whole lot of travel here but we don't need much and this will be held directly in the rocker tool poost the indicator is in the tool po post and it's uh perpendicular to the work and I've checked it to see that it's pretty much on Center and make sure you have enough travel back and forth so you can cover most of the length of the test bar that's why I don't care for the magnetic base indicator because it's usually setting on one side or the other and you don't have full range which is a problem especially if your test bar is shorter than what I've got here and again this is a 12 iner and here we go I do have the tail stock clamped now and I went in there and I I line the ascenders as well as I could with the index Mark and let's see how close it is the indicator is mounted and I'm going to feed the cross feed in so I have about a full revolution of travel approximately bring it in zero or bring your your dial around to zero however you like to do it and then we're going to run it down toward the tail stock okay the indicator is on zero and I'm moving the carriage down as close as I can get it to the tail stock and we are about 5,000 off so if we were turning a a piece of Steel 12 in long we would have a a 5000 taper not 5° but 5,000 taper from one end of the other see if we can zoom in on that a little bit to show you see there's a 5000 taper or the I should say that the tail stock is out of line by 5,000 so what I'm going to do now is to move the uh tail stock over 5000 and I have to unlock it in order to do that I'm now going to move the top half of the tail stock away from me with the set screws see the the needle and then I'm tightening the back one up against the front one now I'm going to lock the tail stock which is out of camera rang you see may see it move a little bit but I don't believe it did so we're right on zero now and I'm going to run toward the headstock now and see if we are in a line or if we have to make a little bit of a correction it sometimes you have to do it more than once I am moving the carriage toward the head duck and can you see that it's staying right on zero let's zoom and see what we got camera angle is a little bit funny here but we are on zero and you can go back and forth a couple times and make sure that you really got it make sure that your tail stock is clamped and that your centers are uh your tail stock quill is pushed up tight and now what I've shown you here and now we're in perfect alignment or darn near perfect alignment I'm not sure there's anything that's perfect but I would uh go back and forth a couple times what everything I showed you can be done really in 5 minutes or less if you have this test bar and you have a little indicator holder made so it's it's really not very hard at all it took me a lot longer to explain it than it I would be able to do it much faster if I was just doing it on my own another view of it moving back across the test bar toward the tail stock and it stays on Zero thanks for watching this is tuban saying soong for now

Channel: mrpete222

Views: 93,779

Keywords: Tips, #99, aligning, lathe, centers, atlas, test, bar, method, clausing, south, bend, logan

Id: 26X4YELiA0I

Length: 11min 13sec (673 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 10 2012