Hi Guys
Inspired by posts on here (most notably fixing darrens lathe) I have decided to check and service my machines. Some of you may have seen from my other posts that I am in the market for a larger mill & lathe, so I converted my Taig mill from CNC back to manual. When I got the mill, I immediatley converted it to cnc (after playing with the handwheels for a while whilst going oooooh), so in short I have never manually milled, and thought that I should so that I had a better odea of what I want in a new mill.
Well I got it back to manual and found quite a bit of backlash on the Y axis (moves the table to/from the column?), I measured it as 3 thou. I measured it by putting my dti up against the table, and moved the wheel to 0 one way, and then turned the handle very slowly until the needle budgedm hand wheel registered a movement of 3 thou before the needle moved. This was the only way I could think to measure it as the machine is imperial and my DTi in metric.
Now I have a confession to make, I have not stripped this machine back down since it was first converted to cnc, the gibs were out, I had backlash and there was oily gunk everywhere. So i thought I would stip it down.
It is currently in pieces being cleaned up.
Now as for my lathe, after reading bogs log of fixing darrens lathe I though "oh cr*p" as I have always struggled to get a decent finish, nothing a bit of W&D doesn't fix, and sometimes I do get a nice finish, normally it has ridges in it (I always thought that I just did not have a fine enough feed), so I want to set the lathe up as if I just bought it 2nd hand., so what do I check, and how do I check it?
Starting with the carriage bed, the only way I could think of was to mount the dti stand on the cross slide, the dti arm on the bed, and move the carriage back and for, I get a max offset of 0.03mm, is that 1 thou or 11 thou?.
Obviously I need to also check the chuck & tailstock, tailstock I am fairly sure is out but I don;t know how to check it not having a test bar or co-axial dial indicator.
I have some very straight looking steel rods out of a desktop scanner, but doubt they were made to the correct tolerances. And they are obviously an unknown.
Any advice?
I uploaded a bunch of pics here until I can find a better batch image resizer for linux:
http://pomme-bleu.co.uk/wedding/categories.php?cat_id=3&page=1