Well, now I am slowly enbarking on a longer project on/with my C3 lathe. The project is of the kind that if one wants to do this, then one might just as well do both that and the other
The means that I intend to put the saddle micrometer stop in place, but that requires that I remove the saddle to drill and tap the fastening hole, and to remove the saddle I have to remove the apron and lead screw as well. All in all this amounts to several things to be done in sequence:
- Strip down the saddle, apron and leadscrew
- Make a swarf guard for the apron hand-wheel gears
- Update the hand-wheel like the MEW example but with my own scale ring
- Fit the saddle micrometer stop
- Make and fit a saddle lock
- Fit the saddle and adjust backlash to as little as ever possible
- add ball bearings to both leadscrew ends
- Add a dis-engageable hand-wheel to the leadscrew.
So right now I am trying to make all the needed parts in advance while my C3 is still assembled. The first bits produced are the parts for the right hand leadscrew bearing and the leadscrew hand-wheel. The following pic shows the bits:

The black thingy is the housing (sorry for the bad photo angle).The lower row from left to right shows:
- The extension sleeve that I add because I want to move the whole assembly to the right with about 20 mm to gain extra travel for the saddle and a good position for the leadscrew hand-wheel.
- left ball bearing which is a 12x28x8 bearing,
- an inner ring distance and the right ball bearing (same type).
- Then the leadscrew extension.
- The lock nut pushing the bearings together to eliminate backlash.
- Finally a dial that will fit over the hand-wheel and cover the lock nut. The fiducial line will be on the housing. The shown dial will be replaced with one that is a bit wider but it will look the same. This dial will go on the apron hand-wheel instead.
A trial assembly of the parts without the hand-wheel shows that it will be a quite compact assembly in the end.

As you can see, there is no fastening screw on what will be the underside. This is because the bearing has been moved past the "leg" on the right side and there is nothing to put a screw into so there are two screws at the top and two guide pins to fix the bearings position once it is fitted. Adding the hand-wheel, the whole setup will look something like this (but not nipped in the bench vice)

This pic shows more clearly the fastening holes.
I choose to make the extension sleeve slightly conical because then I think/hope that if I run with the leadscrew clamp closed for left-hand threading for example, the clamps will be forced open when climbing on the sleeve, but whether it works remains to be seen. Anyway it looks nice
BR
/Peter