Hello all,
Just thought I would post a brief note about something I learned last night while reading 'The Shop Wisdom of Rudy Kouhoupt', volume three. He had a brief sidebar in his article on how to make one's own lathe collets that commented, " I have encountered lathes from Austria and Taiwan that are calibrated to indicate the angle between the compound slide and the longitudinal axis of the lathe. If you are working on a lathe calibrated this way, you will have to set your compound slide to the complementary angle of 61° in order to have the compound slide in the correct position."
Kaching! It struck me immediately why I've been struggling to cut decent single point threads on my Maximat V10P in spite of doing everything imaginable to get good threads including buying several purpose-built tools specifically for threading - I've been setting the compound over to 29°, assuming it was the same angle I used on my Atlas lathe. One reads 29° and figures I'm smack on target. I've been trying darn near everything I could think of to make decent, clean threads and every time they would be torn and terrible, necessitating a less-than-satisfactory 'clean-up' with a die.
Went into the shop this morning to make sure and it's as plain as the nose on my face - when the protractor on the compound is set to '0°' the compound is parallel to the ways rather than 90° to the ways as it is with the Atlas.
My understanding is many of the older Emco Maier clones from Taiwan were basically copies of the Maximat and it's possible others may run into the same problem so I thought I should pass it along
All the best,
Mike