MadModder

Mike,

Water pipe copper will bend nicely in a vice, if it's longer than the vice jaws, a couple of smooth pieces of angle iron to extend. Hammer to form angle. Soft solder will be more than adequate for a rain cover. Anneal before cutting by heating red hot, quench in water of air cool.

Cheers, Matthew

It does John but fortunately everything is being kept in the same environment. It was surprisingly significant when I was grinding the taper gauge and measuring how far it penetrated  the female taper in the chuck. Seating tapers is a funny old business, a little goes a long way, and over shooting is only too easy!

I think the major issue is to get the taper to seat leaving just a nat's thing-a-me-bob of clearance between the chuck and it's flange, so when the bolts are torqued down the taper is pulled well home. The internal mating faces where the hydraulic ports join is marginally less critical due to the aforementioned O rings giving a bit of tolerance.

I'm pleased to say with the larger taper of the 'adaptor to lathe spindle interface', once bolted up, and then unbolted, it took a few persuasive blows from a large rubber dead blow hammer to unseat it  and it's that sort of fit I want to achieve with the 'adaptor to collet chuck interface'

(A self releasing taper needs to be 16 degrees or greater - this one is 2 x 7.125 = 14.25 degrees so just on the self holding side of the line!)

It’s all about surface area of the joint.

Conventionally copper ware joints would be castellated like a box joint if laps or folds weren’t possible.

I have to get three features to all come together at the same time. The male and female taper, the adaptor to spindle flange (with perhaps a few tens of microns gap to pull the taper firmly together ) and the inner face where the hydraulic ports are. Again these can have the odd tens of microns gap as there are O rings squashed here to seal the ports.

Thanks for the suggestion.

The face where the under cut should be has to contact the relevant bit of the chuck absolutely and precisely when the tapers close together.

As the taper wont close without the under cut I cannot be sure the sizes are right, and dismounting it would be counter productive concentricity wise,

I had already thought that I could 'half machine' the taper, mount it on the manual lathe for undercutting, remount it on the CNC and finish the taper but it's fraught with introduced inaccuracies

 . . . .it's all a  blooming palaver !