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Tom Griffin
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My dad got an Atlas lathe a few years back which made Christmas shopping for him very easy, I just made tools and accessories to fit the lathe. One of those accessories was a micrometer carriage stop which he uses quite often. It clamps to the ways with a couple of socket head cap screws and is adjustable with a graduated thimble to .001". One turn of the thimble moves the stop .050" via a 20 pitch thread.
The body of the stop is made of mild steel and is a fairly simple design and a good exercise for the beginning machinist. It has a couple of odd sized radii cut on the front that require a rotary table (or a file if you don't have one), a couple notches for the clamp, a 7/16-20UNF thread, a reamed hole and a raised surface for the reference mark which will require some creative machining. The reference mark itself was cut with a hand sharpened slotting tool in the locked spindle of a mill using the ram as a sort of hand shaper.
The spindle is a good lathe exercise with 7/16-20UNF threads and a key slot.
The thimble is a simple lathe part made out of stainless with a medium knurl, but it has lots of reference marks like the one on the body, and either stamped or engraved digits to make it more of a challenge. :biggrin:
I thought it might be a useful accessory for those of you with a lathe so I threw together some detail drawings of the parts along with an assembly drawing showing how they all fit together. If you build one, the drawings are not exactly like the one pictured. I switched the thimble end for end so the graduations were easier to read and moved the 1/8 dowel pin to the bottom of the body. Also be sure to check the thickness of the ways on your lathe. I milled and scraped the ways on my dads, so they may be slightly thinner. The design could likely be adapted to other lathes as well with the addition of an appropriate v groove in the body.
The drawings:
Atlas Micrometer Carriage Stop
Tom
The body of the stop is made of mild steel and is a fairly simple design and a good exercise for the beginning machinist. It has a couple of odd sized radii cut on the front that require a rotary table (or a file if you don't have one), a couple notches for the clamp, a 7/16-20UNF thread, a reamed hole and a raised surface for the reference mark which will require some creative machining. The reference mark itself was cut with a hand sharpened slotting tool in the locked spindle of a mill using the ram as a sort of hand shaper.
The spindle is a good lathe exercise with 7/16-20UNF threads and a key slot.
The thimble is a simple lathe part made out of stainless with a medium knurl, but it has lots of reference marks like the one on the body, and either stamped or engraved digits to make it more of a challenge. :biggrin:
I thought it might be a useful accessory for those of you with a lathe so I threw together some detail drawings of the parts along with an assembly drawing showing how they all fit together. If you build one, the drawings are not exactly like the one pictured. I switched the thimble end for end so the graduations were easier to read and moved the 1/8 dowel pin to the bottom of the body. Also be sure to check the thickness of the ways on your lathe. I milled and scraped the ways on my dads, so they may be slightly thinner. The design could likely be adapted to other lathes as well with the addition of an appropriate v groove in the body.
The drawings:
Atlas Micrometer Carriage Stop
Tom
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