Schaublin 135 tailstock adjustment and rebuild

I finally picked up a nice (hopefully very nice for what it cost SFJ center Shared album - Luke Rickert - Google Photos) for my 135 and went to try adjusting the tail stock alignment which was miles out when I acquired the machine. (offset by mm's) The side to side adjustment is clear enough but the vertical direction is confusing. The gib only adjusts one side vertically not the whole thing so it can't really be used to set the the center height, only the front to back level or really the back "V" alignment. The gibs are also in terrible shape with damage that I am totally unable to understand. (135 tailstock - Google Photos) The stamped number doesn't match the bed so who knows the history of the thing.

So am I correct that if I don't end up replacing the whole tailstock with a better one I will need to rebuild the tailstock to get the center height perfect by adding some sort of shim between the top and bottom portions and then scrape down and level sliding surfaces of the base? Good thing I just took a 5 day scraping class a couple weeks ago Now I just need a power scraper so it won't take me a week to do. Although given the damage to the V maybe I should machine that down and install some sort of bronze sheet or even cast iron which I can scrape in. I don't think the plastic compounds would be wise given the clamping forces involved with locking the tailstock in place.

I re-scraped the compound slide in the class and it is much better than when I started which is a good thing It wasn't massively worn but there was some strange abuse that had peened over some metal at the end of the slide which made adjustment of the gibs difficult. The top profile made measurement a bit of a challenge since it doesn't really set flat upside down. I ended up scraping the non-critical top and bottom as well so I could measure it accurately. I still re-scraped everything although I only needed to do a couple passes to break up the ground surface on the moving dovetail for oil retention. I guess I could flake them as well but that seems overkill for something that doesn't get used much and Schaublin didn't see the need originally. The compound on the 135 still isn't quite as smooth as my 102 so I may work on it a bit more but really it is very nice. The cross slide is probably next although not before I have a power scraper. I did the whole compound with a BL 10 and small blade and see no reason to do anything else by hand as I actually have more control and am less likely to scratch with the power scraper.

Luke

Luke!
The center certainly is nice. They usually cost a lot. Is it new? The vertical adjustment on the tailstock is done one side only. It results in a little tilt if a lot of adjustment is neccesary, but normally hardly noticeable. If a lot of adjustment is necessary you sometimes need to rescrape a little, and follow up by a little adjustment in the horizontal plane.
Ole

The center is unused (NOS) and came from a fellow PM member as part of a B32 collet swap (my inch collets for his metric), It seems to be very nice. I could have gotten something cheaper but can't see introducing inaccuracies or at least uncertainties with a cheap center. This one is perhaps a bit heavier capacity than strictly needed but should work well. I like the built in pressure indicator so you can see if you have enough or too much pressure applied.

The tailstock height adjustment seems rather out of character for Schaublin so I probably don't fully understand the designer's vision with that one I will get the height correct and then blue up and check the base. It will be interesting to see how much scraping is needed.

L