Since folks here enjoy project logs, I thought I'd post one of mine that I happened to document well.
I've got a buddy that acquired a Hardinge TL10 in college; beautiful lathe, and he made a tailstock to match, as the original had gone walkabout. Years later, he emails me and says that there is a TL10 on fleabay... in Houston! I contacted the seller and headed over. To my VAST surprise, the sign outside reads "Stark Industries".
https://madmodder.net/Smileys/default/confused0068.gif Really! I bought my lathe from Mr. Stark! No, his first name wasn't Tony. OH, well.
The TL10 is irritatingly short of documentation and the bits are rare and expensive. Being a machine nut, I wanted two of the special bits: the taper attachement and the follow rest. Someone on the Hardinge forum had posted a drawing of the follow rest, and I've seen pictures of a few different ones. A key thing to keep in mind as you read this: when I started, I had never actually used a follow rest.
The drawing I had didn't actually agree with my lathe all that well, and it seemed to be designed to suit a lathe fitted with a lantern tool post (tool centerline through the compound centerline). I thought about it a lot, and drew up a follow rest in Autocad. A bit of fiddling and I ported the layouts to my 3D printer and made full scale models for fit testing.
I ended up deciding it should have TWO sets of fingers so I could support things near the chuck and near the tailstock. The pieces were plasma cut from my models, and had tabs designed in to make it self-jigging. I used lots of clamps and a magnetic chuck to get everything assembled for tacking.
Just an aside: a magnetic chuck is a HUGE help for welding and grinding; you can just drop plasma cut stuff on there, mag it down, and grind the dross off quickly! Grinding welds and stuff is also much easier when the durn thing stays put.