Cross feed dial or DRO on antique lathe

As my Macgregor Gourlay lathe restoration is finally starting to rap up I am now getting around the the smaller details. Like making it more practical to use. The current problem or inconvenience is the cross feed dial. Or rather what is being passed off as a dial. I suspect it was possible home made or maybe it came with it who really know. Its a thin round ring with some line marked or maybe engraved around it. It is about 1" in diameter and has no numbers and not very many divisions around it. I haven't yet measured the movement for each division but it doesn't really mater because it is so tiny and faded. I had planned on making a new one until I made the new cross feed nut and found out that the cross feed screw is 6 threads per inch sadly that doesn't work out to nice even .001" increments on the dial. or at least not when I did the math. I am now considering a cheap DRO but the cross feed doesn't look very simple for installation.

For those of you running old iron and still using it what do you do? I don't imagine that this is the only really old lathe with an odd pitch cross feed screw. Have many people gone the route of putting a DRO on a 100 year old machine? I'm not worried about taking away from the machine being original or hurting its value as an antique. Frankly where I live its worth next to nothing as an antique but the more usable it is as a lathe the more it is worth. Both to my self and others.

I can take some picture and post them if it helps just let me know what you would like to see.

Mag base with a 2" or more dial indicator .

As a user of a lathe (more than one actually) with NO cross feed dial, I've often thought that a DRO would be the least invasive and most practical way to get to that convenience.

I have done as JohnEvans says above. It works quite well actually. The old lathes are not "accurate" in a modern sense - but they are "repeatable." At least in my experience.

Joe in NH

If it is semi important to KNOW, I set the mag base indicator where it will do some good and clamp another where it reads cross slide

That is my plan for the mean time but I did that with my mill and I found it to be a constant pain in the but. Eventually I out a cheap DRO on the mill to avoid the human error factor when it came to relocating them or making sure I didn't bump them. Sadly that happened more than I care to admit.

My DI setup

Here is what I use,cheap and effective.

I get a chuckle out the guys who take a 100 year + old lathe and start talking about making it into a CNC. Some things I just can't understand, but owning a historic article makes one into it's curator, a second job of it's own.
I admit to wanting to make a good DRO setup for my shaper, and I'm sure it would make it a much better tool for me anyway.
I think shapers would be much less rare today if they had DRO's.

I made a mounting for an indicator that moves with the cross slide. Facing it, I have a rod mounted on the saddle I can adjust. It isn't perfect but since I made this, about 4 or 5 years ago, I can consistently hit my measurements dead on or within .001.

I just put a used Acu-Rite DRO on my WB Knight #2 circa ~1911. I know its a mill and not a lathe, but with half a hand wheels rotation of backlash in the screw/nut and the "dial" in the shape its in, some old 10um scales and an Acu-Rite III box is better than before.

Jon

Talking about modifying an antique, probably I'd start with replacing the 6 TPI nut and screw with a 8 or 10 TPI one. Then, unless you have any physical interference, you can make a larger dial.
In retrofitting a lathe with a DRO, installing the cross-slide axis is always the most challenging portion, especially on old lathes with nice curves in the casting, instead of flat and squared surfaces.

I'd vote for using a dial indicator, perhaps with a fix base, even if it requires to drill and tap the carriage and/or the cross slide.

Just a technical tip: if the challenge is that the surface where it is best to mount is not flat, you can use JB-Weld or equivalent to model the interface between the casting and the dial holder itself (don't forget release agent on the casting).

Paolo