All dressed up with no place to go

Re: All dressed up with no place to go

John Lucas

>Arch

The HF cross slide is too sloppy. I have one. It's not bad for positioning things under the drill press but really lousy if you want to use it as any kind of cross feed.

I bought a decent cross feed from either www.travis.com or Enco I forget which for $80 on sale. It has about 8 or 10 inches of movement and is really solid. I've use it under the drill press for light milling but drill presses weren't made for this so you get chatter unless you take really light cuts.

I've thought about adapting it to my Powermatic to do some ornamental work. It should do it quite easily. You would need to rig up a way to hold either the work piece or a dremel or flexshaft tool so that you could move it in and out. it's heavy. Probably weights 35 or 40lbs.

Re: All dressed up with no place to go

Arch

>Thanks John, I'll take your opinion and advice since it's from experience. I knew that the HF vise was sloppy, but I hoped to take enough slop out by tightening the dovetail splines and drilling and tapping for a brass pin to tighten against the threads. They are probably rolled instead of cut, and not true acme, so I probably can't take the backlash out by cranking the slides toward the work before touching it.

Sometimes, I can be too thrifty (read cheap) for my own good, but I hope some of you will suggest some uses and maybe a tutorial or article about using a decent cross slide.

Re: All dressed up with no place to go

Don Evans

>Actually Arch they are called gimbles. The inexpensive cross slide vises one see's for $50.00 (4" jaw) will work. The gimbles have screws that can be adjusted to take up the slop, and they also have a thumb screw that you normally tighten when using just to keep it from moving.

It can be used but it appears to me it would get agravating to keep tighting all up. I have one that I use on the drill press and it's great for that. I've thought about mounting it on the wood lathe but I also have metal lathe. The problem with mounting on the wood lathe is I would want it mounted sideways so I would need a 90 deg holder for it and as stated, it's heavy. I wanted it for checkering gun handles so it would also have to be able to rotate on the mount.

As far as slop in the acme screws that is true with lots and lots of metal lathes and it shouldn't really be a problem. If I need precision, I don't go by the dials anyway and use magnetic dial indicator. But, on the lathe dial or vise if you back out the slop before releasing gimble lock you can use the dial for most things.

I just need to get busy and make an indexing head for my metal lathe.

I'd love to have the one John got for $80 but I haven't seen one of those for less that $160 or so. Micromark as one, lighter duty, for $100.00 but wonder if it's heavy duty enough.

Don

Re: All dressed up with no place to go

Greg in Oshkosh

>This would also be just the thing for cutting threads on boxes. You would only need to add a device for holding the chuck and advanceing it forward