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APT boring heads, what's your rating?

Don't know about the boring heads

I have several pieces of APT tooling that I like quite a lot, they have always made a quality product, at least in my experience. I have, however, never tried the boring heads.
 
I have one good one and one not so good one. The good one is older, is better finished, and holds tolerance well. The newer one looks a little rougher, and the dovetail needed to be smoothed out when I got it - there were still fairly deep tool marks in it. It still doesn't seem to hold a tolerance all that well, but I think that's more likely the fault of the large-radius insert I have in the boring bar than anything else (I only use brazed carbide boring bars in the other one, with practically no radius). Mine are both 3" models, with integral R8 shanks, for what it's worth.

One complaint is how close the lines on the dial are - it's hard to split them, because there are 100 divisions/revolution. Look at an old Bridgeport, and you'll see there are 50 div/rev.

Okay, I have two complaints. Why can't all the set screws be the same size? The APT has three different size screws, when they could probably have figured out how to get away with one.

Andrew
 








 
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