02-24-2015, 07:49 PM
Been away for work a bit lately and that has kept me out of the shop. Now that I'm home for the time being, I was doing a bit of tweaking and cleaning on one of my lathes an, old Jet 10x24.
Looking at the gib on the cross slide, it is of the pretty typical parallelogram profile with a notch on one end that engages the adjusting screw. Nothing unusual. What I did note was that one side was clearly hand scraped at many points along its length.
So why would the manufacturer have done this? It is a fairly long and somewhat thin piece, and it gets sandwiched between the slide and the carriage dovetail. Why would it need to be scraped? I can see the need of it to be pretty flat to assure lots of contact area and that the thickness is even. Were I to make another one of these (theoretical question...) would simply doing a decent once-over with a surface grinder be "close enough" for it to work properly?
Mostly just curious, but the answers have obvious applications for any future projects.
Interested in the group wisdom...
Thanks!
-Al
Looking at the gib on the cross slide, it is of the pretty typical parallelogram profile with a notch on one end that engages the adjusting screw. Nothing unusual. What I did note was that one side was clearly hand scraped at many points along its length.
So why would the manufacturer have done this? It is a fairly long and somewhat thin piece, and it gets sandwiched between the slide and the carriage dovetail. Why would it need to be scraped? I can see the need of it to be pretty flat to assure lots of contact area and that the thickness is even. Were I to make another one of these (theoretical question...) would simply doing a decent once-over with a surface grinder be "close enough" for it to work properly?
Mostly just curious, but the answers have obvious applications for any future projects.
Interested in the group wisdom...
Thanks!
-Al