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| vtsteam:
I need a steady rest to do the taper boring, and I remembered I had bought an old one at the Bernardston Gas Engine show a number of years ago. I found it in a crate of other goodies after a short search and set it up onto the ways to compare its center to the headstock center. It was an inch tall, so it must have been for an 11" lathe. |
| vtsteam:
One leg was longer than other other, and one leg had a notch for prismatic ways. I marked it for cutting an inch off, and realized that would just leave the bottom web of the casting, for a nice wide flat surface. It took a long while to figure out how to mount the casting on my 4x6 bandsaw, but some holes I'd tapoped came in handy for clamping it on top of the standard vise with some mill toe clamps and studs. |
| vtsteam:
Legs sawn off. I then took it to the mill to surface the bottom. |
| vtsteam:
Unfortunately, when I re-assembled it, this steady rest turned out to be one of the worst examples of domestic casting I've ever seen. Not that the castings themselves were all that bad, but the fit and finish were horrendous. For one thing, the fingers were very roughly cast with the draft still present (not milled out), irregularly shaped on probably a belt sander (linisher?) and they were different thicknesses and didn't meet in a flat plane. |
| vtsteam:
Besides the different thicknesses of the fingers, the main casting channels had never been milled. They looked like someone had molded them with bubble gum. The irregularities added to the mismatch of the fingers, and keeping them in one plane was impossible. |
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