Adapting A Machine Dovetail?

[entityunknown]

I just wanna say that I made my cross slide dove tail for my Grizzly G8688. I just need to drill the holes in the cross slide but there's a guy on Youtube that did this mod for his Grizzly based on the Craftsman dovetail. Search "G0768 Compound Modification" and you can see what he did. It looks great and I look forward to testing it out but I can't see how it will fail. It's a wonderful design!

So how could this help you? Well I made the dove tail setup on the lathe just as the guy did and most lathe parts are built on a lathe so you should just be able to do this yourself? You do need a functional compound to make the dove tail but you could always take off enough material then use an angle file to shape a dove tail in.

With a carbide insert tool and 2" cold rolled steel, I had my all in one dove tail/base for the compound made in what would have been about 2 hours at n00b skill level with a pretty decent finish. With those cheap carbide tipped soft steel inserts, I had an extra 4 hours into it, tons of chatter, 3 tool breaks, and a terrible finish which I needed the inserts to finish and clean up the dirty work.

The only real problem was how close your tool holder and tool will be to the chuck teeth but with a lil care and probably a shop magnifying light, you'll be safe

 

[mephits]

Thanks for the video entityunknown, but unfortunately, I'm not looking at replacing the compound. I'm looking at replacing the cross slide; the part the compound mounts to. Check this photo ( https://i.ytimg.com/vi/0lsZSF4MTvw/maxresdefault.jpg *) to see what I mean. On the left is the standard Atlas cross slide with the compound removed and on the right, a factory-original Atlas T-slot cross slide. I have a source for one of these factory-made slides, but it's too big for my lathe. That's the dovetail I was talking about adapting.

I'd actually prefer to have one of Metal Lathe Accessories' Atlas T-Slot Cross slides ( http://www.statecollegecentral.com/metallathe/A-11.html ) but I have no milling capability at the moment, nor have I found anything local that isn't a commercial shop charging commercial rates.

May I also say that my opinion of Grizzly tools just went down a great deal from watching the video you referenced. That's a terrible lathe design and very chinzy-looking parts! I know they're just rebadging import equipment, but they could at least take a bit of time to think about what they're potentially selling before slapping their name on it. I'm a total Newb and I can tell that's crap.

* Note that this linked photo is from one of Lyle Peterson's (Tubalcain / MrPete222) YouTube videos. I claim no ownership and use it only for illustrative purposes.