Building A Taper Attachment For Sheldon Lathe?

[wa5cab]

JR,

I assume that the reason that all of these offsetting centers I've seen either drawings of or photos of (If I recall correctly, there was in DOWNLOADS a probably 1940's magazine article on making one, but I've no idea what the file name was) use dead centers is that at least for 2MT and 3MT, the ball bearing head on a live center tends to make the live center about an inch longer than the same size dead center. The offsetting center is already longer than a dead center. And if you add a live center to it, it will be longer yet. something like two or three inches of the gadget hanging out in front of the tailstock ram. Which might not be desirable.

 

[Kernbigo]

You are correct the head stock center is the ball nose center so you can pivot a radical angle if you need to. The adjustable tail stock is not live it is dead, check out the pictures the center next to the ball nose one is a Enco one but only has .010 adjustment, the other adjustable one, has a tremendous amount of adjustment

 

[JR49]

The offsetting center is already longer than a dead center. And if you add a live center to it, it will be longer

Point taken, wa5cab, although my Logan has plenty of ctr. to ctr. room I see that the extra length could introduce accuracy and rigidity issues. Will have to rethink this live ctr. decision. Thanks, JR49

 

[wa5cab]

Right. I wasn't really thinking about loss of work space but rather of rigidity at the tailstock end.

 

[BobSchu]

Now I just have to round up the pieces and put it together. Should work perfectly for what I need at the moment. I don't suppose anyone would have an old import boring head and 3MT shaft they would like to get rid of?
Thanks, Bob

 

[todd774]

Anyone here built a taper attachment for an older Sheldon Lathe? Is it worth the trouble and how did you do it? I have an older 11" Sheldon that didn't come with a taper attachment and I want to do some rifle barrel work on it. Without a taper attachment I'm thinking I'm pretty much going to be out of luck- but them I'm pretty much an amateur at this so I'm pretty much just learning this stuff on the fly anyway.....

Some ideas on how to proceed would be greatly appreciated.

TIA,
Bob

Hi Bob. Try this website http://kinzers.com/don/MachineTools/taper_att/ It's plans for a southbend 9", but you might be able to modify
the plans to suit your lathe. I thought about building this one day so I saved the website.
Good luck
Todd K.

 

[Fabrickator]

I found some pics of mine. I got the plans off of an old master machinist, Frank Harth, that uses a small four jaw chuck, so it's a multi-purpose jig. I found a new, Unimat independent 4-jawon Ebay for about $35. It mounts on the tailstock/MT3 (LMS, I think) & uses a live center. As I said, I use my height gauge to level it off the bed ways. If I remember right, I think it has about a 1/2" range.

 

[BobSchu]

Great ideas and links guys. Now I have to figure out which one will work best for my projects. I checked my tailstock last night and realized it isn't a MT3 taper, it is actually a MT2. Digging around in the bucket full of attachments, reamers, and accessories I got with the lathe I found a couple small 4 jaw independent chucks, a couple drill type chucks, at least 3 dead centers and a huge live center that is too large for consideration for this project, and a number of other parts and pieces that will help me out. If I have time in the next few days, I will see if the 4 jaw can be converted to a taper shaft for mounting in the tailstock. I've located a few places that have the import boring head with MT2 shaft, including Shars and a couple others- including fleabay and Amazon.
Building the full fledged Taper attachment as per the link sent by Todd would be my first choice, but much more labor intensive and won't probably happen until I have the time to tackle it sometime in the future.

Great ideas all gentlemen. I hope I'm not the only one benefitting from all of the help on this thread. I'm learning more every day on this site. Thanks a bunch for that. As a relative newbie to this I need all the help I can get.

Bob

 

[jsh]

Bob, did you ever come up with anything on this subject?
I finally found and bought a lathe, not even home and in place yet and I am chasing stuff around,lol.
Jeff

 

[woodchucker]

Well, you have more trust in the stability of tanged morse tapers than I have learned to have.

you can always drill and tap your ts quill for set screws to lock the tangs from rotating. So the solution is acually simple and allows an alternative to a full blown taper attachment.