Lathe tailstock refubishment

[olderdan]

When I first acquired my 1939 model B South Bend lathe I became obvious it had had a hard life.
It was a war effort supply to a UK dockyard and was purchased at auction.
After the usual refurbishment the main problem was tailstock base wear, unlike the saddle there were no bed wipers which are now added.
The wear seemed to be more pronounced at front resulting in the barrel being tilted downwards, after a few years of use by adding shims between the sub base I decided that a more permanent solution had to found.
After removing the wear ridges and hand scraping the base this came in the form of line boring the tailstock casting on the lathe with a long boring bar supported with a three point steady with the saddle pushing it along the bed ( a spring placed under the clamp bolt) the cut stopping at the threaded end.
The actual size was not critical as a new barrel would have to be made to suit, about .025 thou was needed to clean up.
This left the problem of a now eccentric thread at the hand wheel end and a few options were explored, I am not a fan of rack feed tailstocks as they can make larger drills difficult to control so I decided to keep things as original as possible and work around it. As I knew how much material had been removed the threaded boss was bored out and an eccentric bush was made ( easy to align as there is an oil hole at the top).
A new barrel was made using the original bronze feed nut and I now have a good as new setup no more wandering drills and between centres turning is a breeze, not bad for a 77 year old lathe.

While everything was dismantled I decided to convert to a lever clamp system, so a flat surface was milled on the base in preparation for this and a hole bored though the back face in line with the clamp bolt.

I will detail this in another post as it has been a great mod and makes backing out small drills much easier.