Need lathe dogs - which ones?

I've got what I believe to be an original South bend drive plate for my 10L, but no dogs. What type should I be looking for? Does the bent arm need to be a precision fit in the slot?

Also, if anyone has a set of dogs for a heavy 10 I would be interested.

Lucaselef said:

I've got what I believe to be an original South bend drive plate for my 10L, but no dogs. What type should I be looking for? Does the bent arm need to be a precision fit in the slot?

Also, if anyone has a set of dogs for a heavy 10 I would be interested.

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The bent arm does NOT need to be a precision fit, in fact I've never seen one that is. Pretty sure drive dogs are a generic tool, as long as it fits you can use it on any lathe. They come in lots of sizes, I could be wrong, but don't think there is such a thing as a "set". If you don't find any here, they are always available on ebay.

I have a set of American made lathe dogs, but i couldn't say if they were sold as a set, or one at a time. They step up in size, per work or shaft size.

Not sure there are South Bend brand, or not. I'll have to check the brand of mine, but think like Armstrong for tool holders.

I buy whatever random ones I find at flea markets and such. If the post is small I put a piece of shrink tube or rubber hose over it so it doesn't clank. There are a couple styles, cast, machined, straight and bent, and my rule is, "whatever works."

For the most part the bent leg on the dog doesn't need to fit the drive plate accurately. In fact making it too tight might screw up the floating alignment because even the decent Armstrong's are forged pretty roughly into shape. Where it might be important is when single pointing threads between centers. then you might want to bailing wire the dog leg to the back side of the slot on the drive plate however possible. If it isn't done that way it could screw up where that thread starts during multiple passes if that leg isn't always in the exact same position against the back of the slot. For normal turning between centers I don't have nor have I ever felt the need for an actual slotted drive plate at all. I make up a stepped 60 degree center where the step butts up against the jaws on a scroll chuck so it can't be forced back from any tail stock pressure, make a light clean up cut on that 60 degree center each time it's used so it's exactly concentric to the spindle center line, and then just let one of the chuck jaws provide the drive on the dog. That saves doing a chuck change to the drive plate and the center will be as accurate as the spindle bearings allow every time. That shop made head stock center is basically expendable tooling if you use it enough to have nothing left after it's re-cut dozens of times.

Rudy Kouhoupt in one of his HSM articles quite a few years ago made up his own drive plate and used a short threaded in pin sticking out 90 degrees to the drive plates face instead of that drive slot. That way it was easy to tie wire his shop made straight leg dogs to the pin. Like Conrad aptly said, use whatever works. I've got a few of the bent leg forged drive dogs, but more I've made myself using Rudy's design of a straight short pin in basically a short section of heavy wall pipe and a cross screw against the part since there a bit better balanced and maybe a little safer since the protruding parts are as short as you can make them.

a while back I needed a 2" lathe dog. Ended up making one out of a 2" nut, and welded a 1/2" round stock on the side. one other mod that I have done is put brass inserts on the screws so the threads or what ever I have placed in the dog will not get marked up.