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Cross feed and taper attachment quirk

706jim

Titanium
Joined
Jun 14, 2006
Location
Thunder Bay Canada
My Sag 14 is equipped with a taper attachment. It is rarely used and floats up and down the bed with the carriage; that is it is not anchored to the ways. I generally use hand feed when parting off and on a couple of occasions noticed that the handwheel seemed to "slip" when cutting pressure was high. I'm aware of the typical backlash on the cross feed screw, but noticed that when I backed the tool out of a cut, it would start cutting again at a significantly different X axis setting.

Sooooooo, it turns out that the cross feed screw pulls on the unlocked taper attachment and literally creeps down the slide (gib) as the cross feed is adjusted.

The solution was to set the taper attachment at zero and this problem then disappeared.

For the likes of me, I don't recall this behaviour when the machine was in its school environment, and its been too long for me to remember where the attachment was normally set as we didn't use that accessory for teaching.

Maybe this will help someone scratching their head wondering why their machine didn't seem to be going where it was supposed to.
 
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Very interesting. Been a long time since I ran a lathe with a taper attachment, but don't ever remember having this type of issue. Wish my SAG 14 had a taper attachment to worry about.

Ted
 
While my sag14 didn't come with taper attachment, my old clausing did. There is a note in the clausing's manual about setting the taper attachment to 0 degree when not in use.
 
Well, that explains it. A most vexing behaviour when one is not expecting it. The unused taper attachment literally slides sideways if there is a significant load on the cross feed screw and the higher the taper angle, the worse it gets.
 








 
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