I ordered a live center for my recently-inherited Logan lathe. Shars is sometimes cheaper on their site and sometimes cheaper through their eBay store. Somehow in the process I grabbed a 3MT from the eBay store (still cheaper than the 2MT from their own site due to the high shipping cost). So now my brother has a live center for his larger lathe.
I reordered and somehow didn't notice that the 2MT doesn't have a tang on the end of the taper. I tested and sure enough it doesn't eject when the tailstock is fully retracted.
What to do... Oh, hey, the end is threaded! Pull out the screw that's in there protecting the threads and it's an M10-1.5. Hey, I have a bunch of those!
But that socket head is too wide, and the whole thing is too long. If only I had some sort of appropriate tool for cutting that down in an elegant way... Oh, right, the lathe!
The only nuts I had on hand were these weird round ones. I buy hardware from an industrial liquidator at 50 cents per pound. I just grab handfuls of anything that looks interesting or useful. So I used some vise grips to try to jam them together (closer to the cap when I actually did it) and chuck it in the lathe.
My parting tools are too tall for this lathe/toolpost (until I get time to rig them up just right, upside-down, in a vise on the surface grinder), so I just used a basic cobalt bit and ate away, back and forth a little, until it came off. Chamfered the edge a little and I was done.
I realize this is VERY simple for most everyone else here, and it's a far cry from what I have in mind to do with the lathe (and could have been done with a sawzall or hacksaw and a file or grinder in less time), but it is really satisfying to have the tools to make and modify my own tools. I only had about 20 minutes in the shop after work tonight, and I made great use of all 20.
