Hi guys,
First, Richard (Orabanda), and other master machinists, avert your eyes.
This could go into "Why the heck aren't you working on your bike?", but it's pretty lathe specific. I suppose I will get around to sharing this on the South Bend Lathe FB groups I belong to, but it was a lot of fun and gave me a pretty good sense of accomplishment, and that's something to share with old friends. Anyway, that's enough buildup.
My lathe came with a very small dial on the compound rest (the one that pivots on the cross-slide). I watched a few videos on how to make your own dial and figured I'd try it. One of the photos shows the bent Volkswagen wheel that donated the aluminum for the dial, but, in that cut, not enough for the inner ring. Cutting that wheel was a bear, and it took a lot of turning to get down to size, so chose not to do that again. I was surprised by my inability to find a piece of any metal in my garage that would work for the inner ring, then I stumbled on the idea of using a piece of Lexan plastic I had laying around.
On to the machining, the how-to on turning of the basic shapes is likely obvious and known better by several of you. Of course, getting the spoke of the wheel down to a little disc was a lesson in tedium. The key bit of fun was engraving the graticule. The result in the picture is laid down on material excavated from beneath the first failed attempt. The trick for getting 100 graticule marks is to index off of a 100-tooth saw blade on an arbor running through the bore. I almost had it perfect except for one of the "10" lines being in the wrong spot. I plan to disguise that with the set screw. I'm jumping the gun a bit on showing the part without numbers, because I don't own a number set, yet.
Thanks for reading. Continued next post.
Richard L.
