Reconditioning a Relmac lathe

**irving2008** · 12-06-2008

Originally Posted by Kip

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.

**irving2008** · 12-06-2008

Originally Posted by Kip

Here's me thinking everyone has lots of reamers and a working lathe ;) (mine was out of action for 2 days waiting on belts and I was beside myself) My previous one made the rivets for the Titanic.....I sure don't miss it :D Although I discovered that a LH thread requires modification to my 1992 Warco! Oh well it's all fun....Or savage amusement lol

Well when I get this one up and running a LH thread will be easy.... :) can do either, in imperial or metric....

The spindle is going in to be reground tomorrow AM early and I hope to get it back next week. They reckon it'll be 2h work inc setup as they'll need to make a MT3 arbour to hold the nose end and chamber the inside of the tail end to hold it on the grinder centres - they do all precision grinding between centres.

So this weekend I'll turn my attention to the Gamages lathe and get that set up on a board so I can try it out. At least the motor is running!

**Lee Roberts** · 16-06-2008

Originally Posted by irving2008

Well when I get this one up and running a LH thread will be easy.... :) can do either, in imperial or metric....

The spindle is going in to be reground tomorrow AM early and I hope to get it back next week. They reckon it'll be 2h work inc setup as they'll need to make a MT3 arbour to hold the nose end and chamber the inside of the tail end to hold it on the grinder centres - they do all precision grinding between centres.

So this weekend I'll turn my attention to the Gamages lathe and get that set up on a board so I can try it out. At least the motor is running!

Any joy with the Gamages lathe ? how did the regrind go ?