Looks like its time for another update on the 1030 after roughly 300 hours of use. The machine is still running very well, and issues have been minimal.
The spindle developed a knocking at some point, that took some adjusting of the motor mount to re-tension the belt and pulleys. That took about 10 minutes to locate (I originally thought it was coming from the chuck somehow) and 5 minutes to fix. That was in the middle of december and I haven't had an issue since.
The 3 jaw started to come loose on me. I think it was because of temperature changes allowing the bolts to loosen up a bit. It didn't pop off or crash or anything, but when I started working one day (the first cold day we had this year), the finish was garbage on my part. I checked the chuck last and the bolts were hardly torqued down.
I have spun some square parts off center, and I will certainly be needing a new bench for this thing. It couldn't go over 300 RPM before the whole table started to rock back and forth. I used it for facing and squaring some stock for my CNC conversion of the mill since I have trouble getting parts super square on the mill. The head never seems to stay trammed for very long. I also used it to bore out some holes on those parts with no trouble.
I threaded a part for 10x24 to make the cross for the kings on the chess set and it threaded the tiny rod very well.
Here is the chess set as it was done on Christmas. I didn't finish the bishops or the knights unfortunately. I just wrapped up one of the kings and gave that to him, and he was thrilled. I believe his exact words were "Holy **** you made this?!" then he asked if I was trying to make the whole set since he had seen the buckets and buckets of chips I had made. Then I went into the other room and brought them out and there were more expletives. When I asked him what he wanted for Christmas a month or so back, he said "A set of drill bits because I am pretty sure mine are pretty much yours now" (Whoops, I use his bits a lot...)
Here is a closer view of one of the kings. I am going to mill the bottom part square at some point soon.
My girlfriend saw a ring like this online and she said thats the kind she likes. A simple, shiny band. (Its not a wedding ring, we aren't there yet). I made this out of a piece of scrap 303 stainless, then polished it up to 2000, then hit it with mothers polishing compound until I could see myself. It came out a little big for her, so I will make her another at some point. It took about 4 hours to do.
The lathe is overdue for an oil change so I will need to set aside time to do that soon. I am also looking into a flood coolant system for it and I will need to build a new stand because the one I have now isn't cutting it. I will also be making a chamber reamer with it in the coming months so it will need a little bit of work before I do that. I am confident I will be able to hold .0005" with it when I do that. It should also see some barrel work soon too.
I got some cool stuff for it for christmas including a live center, an MT4 to ER32 collet holder (poor mans collet chuck?), a set of ER32 collets and 2 green mountain barrel blanks. When I do the barrel work, I am either going to need to make an outboard spider, or rig something up to hold with 8 points of contact in the 4 jaw. The collet holder advertises .0002" of runout, but I haven't been able to mount it up to confirm. Though I am not hopeful it will do that well.
Here is the collet holder with the largest bolt they had a lowes. It needs an M16 bolt thats at least 8 inches long to use for the draw bar and they only had 6". I am going to look at fastenal before I make one.