Lathe Accessories

On September 3, 2023, I milled a lathe tool holder, mostly because I just wanted to mill something. Here it is on the mill with a long step cut along it.

A few days later I test-fitted it onto the dovetail of my 250-222 quick-change tool post. I'm pretty happy with this fit.

And here is the finished holder on the lathe, clamping a boring/turning tool with a carbide insert. There's a brass knurled adjuster nut on a threaded stud, and four hex bolts. It came out okay. I think I'll make another one and see if I can do better.

The tailstock die holder was progressing in early October. Unfortunately, I bored the end out too big. Facepalm. It was fixable without starting over, fortunately.

To make up for my mistake, I turned an adapter for the end. I also made it dual size, so it can accommodate larger dies. There was still a bit left to do on it at this point.

Having a multicolor printer is great for stuff like this. I probably should have slowed the print down a bit, and I accidentally used silver rather than white for the sizes, but it's more than good enough for its intended purpose.

Here it is installed next to the lathe's DRO, a dial indicator on a magnetic base, and a bottle of way oil.

Then there's stuff like this. It's a support for holding long, thin things stable in the bore of my lathe. It prints in 20 minutes and cost $0.29 worth of filament. Ordinarily you'd use something called a lathe spider for this, which is a whole project of its own and potentially involves drilling holes in the lathe. This is so easy that I'll just make one whenever I need a different diameter.

I'm also digging just leaving a roll of white in the printer all the time so I can embed text in stuff, like the diameter on this one.

A little lathe upgrade I'd been working on: a linear-scale digital readout for the tailstock, on 3D-printed mounts with a printed clamp collar on the quill. One of those screws is a decoy, hiding the broken tap underneath it.

In December 2024 I printed soft jaws for the lathe chuck out of TPU, a flexible filament that's like a fairly firm rubber. Here's the first version fitted on a chuck jaw.

I added a giant fillet in that corner for the final versions, since that corner was obviously going to fail. Here's the final version.

I wound up not using these because - surprise! - metal chips are hot, and plastic doesn't like that. I'll have to do some in aluminum or copper one of these days.

I picked up a Vevor 6-inch six-jaw self-centering chuck with a D1-4 cam-lock backing plate for just north of $200. It arrived covered in grinding dust and with the burrs left on, so it's getting a few hours of deburring with files and blue shop towels to take it from "done" to "operates smoothly". It's nearly finished; next up is mounting it on the lathe and seeing how accurate it actually is. Updates to follow.

Here it is torn down on the bench: the body, the six jaws, the scroll ring, and the backing plate, with a set of needle files standing by.