tapered gibs for mini lathe, buy not make

[Gazz292]

I'd really like to have tapered gibs on all the points of my reel bull CJ18 mini lathe,  but i dont own a milling machine, and am really not good at manually making things (arthritis in hands)

So i was wondering if anyone knew of a place that sells a tapered gib set for my lathe?

[Sea.dog]

You'd also need a matching tapered seat on the cross and compound slides, so they'd need to be machined. It's something that I've thought about for my Boxford. Maybe next year   

[Pete.]

Tapered gibs are a lot easier to make than you'd think - the shapes makes people think that they have a compound taper but in fact they don't. The difficult bit would be cutting a matching taper in the cross-slide as Sea.dog said. One could conceivably make two tapered gibs to create a parallel assembly and fix one in place, make the other adjustable.

If you do make one, make it grossly over-length so that you have plenty to cut off. The shallow taper means that 0.1mm of difference in the thickness means 5-10mm of movement in the gib.