Internal Stock Stop for the Mini Lathe

[dgbreggin]

On a mini-lathe I want to point out. You have no idea how many full size lathes, in full-on commercial shops, taking in serious work at considerable per hour rates, at the hands of 'dedicated' machinists have no spindle stops for any of their lathes.
It's hard for me to look at any lathe and not envision how to arrange a stop. It's harder yet to find a milling machine not fitted with a table stop; why are lathes not regarded equally.
Always the same reply; "shop tooling is wasteful use of man hours", or "it won't get used, just lost".

Well, it would still be productive today IF BUILT WHEN RATES WERE LOWER, and anything getting second operations or just a few handfuls of multiple parts would have paid for it over and over again.
Tools getting lost are accountability issues, past or future.

I couldn't agree more. I learned long ago that making a jig or fixture is rarely a waste. A cleverly designed jig or fixture can often be used for many similar jobs, and will likely save time overall. Even if rarely used, it can significantly improve the quality / precision of the work.

I recently made good use of this internal stop when I was making parts for the external stop (that I will post in the near future). Ironically, I had no thoughts about making an external stop when I made the internal stop more than a year ago.