mega arc 5040dd
Aluminum
- Joined
- Apr 17, 2012
- Location
- Saskatchewan, Canada
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.
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.