Shopsmith Forums

I recently installed the lathe kit on my Mark 5. With the kit in place, the minimum distance between the live end and the fully extended quill with face plate is too great to permit turning short pieces, e.g., bottle stops. Is the any means to lengthen the quill or the tail stock to reduce this minimum distance or do I have to remove the lathe kit to work on short pieces with turning?

Forgive my ignorance, but what is a Lathe Kit? Does it include the Universal Tool Rest?

How far away is it? You can use a morse taper extension (https://zlivecenter.com/index.php?route ... =02006MT22) to extend the reach of your live center in the tailstock.

I'm not sure what you mean by "Lathe Kit" either. If you are talking about the Universal Tool Rest that will extend the distance the Headstock can get from the Tailstock. My Mark 7 has a Lift assist that keeps the headstock from going as close to the Tailstock by 2-1/2" as one without it. Without the Lift Assist using a Live Center with the 1-1/2" Extender I can extend the Quill they would touch points. In the picture below the Lathe drive and Live center points are 2" apart. Without the Extension (and no Lift Assist) the points would be about an inch apart. The Dead Center is a little shorter than the Live Center. The same should be true for the Mark V 520, 510 and 505. The Mark V 500 or earlier Mark V/5's should be even closer to touching as spacing between the Headstock and Tailstock is different. Someone with a Mark V/5 and the original (500) Table System can confirm this since I do not have one at this time.

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robertemery wrote: Sun Jan 17, 2021 12:56 pm I recently installed the lathe kit on my Mark 5. With the kit in place, the minimum distance between the live end and the fully extended quill with face plate is too great to permit turning short pieces, e.g., bottle stops. Is the any means to lengthen the quill or the tail stock to reduce this minimum distance or do I have to remove the lathe kit to work on short pieces with turning?

Unless you're turning between centers, you may not need to use the tailstock for short workpieces. For bottle stoppers in particular, Ruth Niles sells a handy-dandy arbor for turning them on a Shopsmith. You can see it in action in the second pic in this thread. And Shopsmith bills their lathe screw center as being "Especially designed for turning small diameter workpieces from 1-inch to 5-inches long without using a Tailstock Center."

My Goldie spur point and dead center point will just barely overlap(< 1/16") with the quill fully extended.

However since the points are inside the outer ends of the work piece, the minimum workpiece length is slightly less than 1".

I said in my previous post

The Mark V 500 or earlier Mark V/5's should be even closer to touching as spacing between the Headstock and Tailstock is different. Someone with a Mark V/5 and the original (500) Table System can confirm this since I do not have one at this time.

JPG's post above answers that.