Last week's modifications

[badtheba]

I just went through a couple of my ERs trying to make them a bit more functional to how I was using them.

First off I added a small brace at the back of the tie bar on my wall mount one. This let me eliminate the braided (3X 12 ga.) electrical wire I had wrapping the tubes and tie bar up before. I filed the ends of the tie bar ears flat, drilled and tapped holes, then bolted on a piece of aluminum bar stock I contoured to fit around the back of the knob. The knob fits inside rather tight, so there is no wiggle room.

I may still do more to secure it by drilling through the way tubes to put another couple bolts in elsewhere. However, I see people putting chains and things around the top for safety, and wanted something a lot more discrete that would also be fairly easy to duplicate if I did it on another machine, and not permanently change a larger or more important part of the machine.

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[badtheba]

My second modification on another machine I use as a lathe was to place the tailstock on the left side of the pivot base. I had been having trouble with extending the quill on this particular machine. When turning between centers, vibration and other factors seemed to always make the quill retract no matter how snug I thought the lock wedge was. I wanted a way to be able to adjust the live center/tailstock to move it toward the workpiece instead of the other way around. I finished tapping the hole in the pivot base all the way through, then moved the table riser crank to that position. A bolt in the tailstock to push against works just fine. I will put a scrap bolt in there and drill a recess in the head for the adjuster to spin inside of. Someone else gave me the idea to also bolt a tie bar to the tailstock so its position could be tightened down to the tubes as well, so I'm sure I'll do that eventually.

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[badtheba]

My third modification on the same machine used as a lathe was to fix the wedges per Skip's instructions to see if they would hold better. However, because it did no good to reshape the wedges on a machine I had with 2 piece wedges, I wanted to add something this time around that would prevent the one piece wedges from collapsing again. I cut pieces of a scrap 1/4" allen wrench to put in the slot of the 1 piece wedge to fill the gap so the wedge couldn't compress and flatten out as much. I did this to all 3 wedges on this machine, and it was a very noticeable difference. The wedges closed with a much more positive feel to them. However, the quill still slipped when a lot of pressure was applied trying to tighten a work piece between centers, so I feel the tailstock modification was also warranted. I've never had any trouble with the one piece wedges holding in any other operation, but I still think this is a good modification that I'll do on my dedicated drill press.

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