TAIG lathe slide-in-a-toolpost

[uv8452]

TAIG lathe: Chamfers, cones and tapers requires the installation of the accessory compound slide. Mounting and adjusting the tool bits is cumbersome. And chamfers, cones and tapers are very useful and common design elements. With a normal size lathe one can cut small chamfers with a width of 3mm (1/8“) in one pass with the turning tool. But the small TAIG responds to chip sizes (chamfers) over 0.5 mm (20 thousanths) with ugly chatter.

I had the idea to integrate the poor man’s cross slide in a TAIG tool post. That means that the tool post may stay mounted, while you do ‚rectangular’ x or z turning.

When you cut threads you can adjust the threading tool bit at each pass by a small amount in order to cut the thread with just one edge of the tool. (The space required by the TAIG compound slide is just too large for this task.)

All parts are milled out of free-machining steel bars 25x25 mm oder 1 x 1 inch. ‚Free machining’ means easy machining, brittle and benevolent chips and a relatively hight yield strength. (Ask for SAE 1213, or SAE12L14 or SAE1215, in Europe: Automatenstahl 9SMnPb28)

One can imagine some improvements... Scales, a crank, angle adjustment knobs, etc.

Most of the time a 10mm long taper was sufficient for clamping jigs or arbors or centering.