Reconditioning a Relmac lathe

[irving2008]

I was thinking of a bar of plaster in the tailstock ready shaped and then pushed up to the headstock...Did that make sense?

Not really, although i can see where you're coming from. The challenge is that the tailstock is MT1, spindle is 1.25" diameter. You'd have to embed an MT1 arbour into the plaster when casting it in a 1.25"ID tube and how would you ensure its dead central and in line? Seems a lot of hassle to me...

Also a 1.25" reamer is about £70 which is way more than its going to cost to have the spindle reground...

I had a quote from a 'mobile line-boring' company who normally do much bigger jobs but it was silly money. If I had another working lathe and a milling machine I suppose I could make up a line-boring jig using 2 bearings supported on the cross-slide to hold a boring spindle with a small pulley to be driven from my 3phase VFD'd motor and using the tailstock centre to align it... but then if I had another lathe I could take a fine cut off the spindle, although getting an accuracy of 4 - 5thou over a 12" length would probably be tricky.