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Building a follow rest... twice
WeldingRod:
Since folks here enjoy project logs, I thought I'd post one of mine that I happened to document well.
I've got a buddy that acquired a Hardinge TL10 in college; beautiful lathe, and he made a tailstock to match, as the original had gone walkabout. Years later, he emails me and says that there is a TL10 on fleabay... in Houston! I contacted the seller and headed over. To my VAST surprise, the sign outside reads "Stark Industries". https://madmodder.net/Smileys/default/confused0068.gif Really! I bought my lathe from Mr. Stark! No, his first name wasn't Tony. OH, well.
The TL10 is irritatingly short of documentation and the bits are rare and expensive. Being a machine nut, I wanted two of the special bits: the taper attachement and the follow rest. Someone on the Hardinge forum had posted a drawing of the follow rest, and I've seen pictures of a few different ones. A key thing to keep in mind as you read this: when I started, I had never actually used a follow rest.
The drawing I had didn't actually agree with my lathe all that well, and it seemed to be designed to suit a lathe fitted with a lantern tool post (tool centerline through the compound centerline). I thought about it a lot, and drew up a follow rest in Autocad. A bit of fiddling and I ported the layouts to my 3D printer and made full scale models for fit testing.
I ended up deciding it should have TWO sets of fingers so I could support things near the chuck and near the tailstock. The pieces were plasma cut from my models, and had tabs designed in to make it self-jigging. I used lots of clamps and a magnetic chuck to get everything assembled for tacking.
Just an aside: a magnetic chuck is a HUGE help for welding and grinding; you can just drop plasma cut stuff on there, mag it down, and grind the dross off quickly! Grinding welds and stuff is also much easier when the durn thing stays put.
WeldingRod:
I did a lot of tacking and a boatload of welding, intending to make the finished product really nice looking with smooth corners.
WeldingRod:
The three mounting areas were almost co-planar. I decided (what the heck was I thinking) that I could replicate them into a plane. I oiled my surface plate, smoothed some foil onto it, spread epoxy on the feet, and set the steady on the foil. After it was set, I cleared it out of the bolt holes, trimmed it, and did some final sanding. Then, on to paint!
WeldingRod:
After making the fingers, I finally tried it out!
This is where things got ugly... It bolted on just fine, but I found out that the tailstock hit the back steady basically all the time, and the front one wasn't where you needed it to be AND didn't have enough room to clear the tools or work. It did a terrible job of steadying. Scream! https://madmodder.net/Smileys/default/doh-45.gif
Oh, and I didn't get the fingers where they crossed the center line. D'oh!
After some calming beverages and a few days, I started over. At least this time I knew where the center line was and the dratted bolt holes!
WeldingRod:
Did I mention that I drilled and tapped a hole in my saddle to make the bad one work?
The second one went together much faster. An important trick I used: the main structure is two layers of steel. The fingers go in slots in one layer and the other layer has the matching bolt hole. I discovered that a steady rest actually wants to have the fingers offset so they can cross, and its nice to have three fingers. Thus, one of my plates has two slots and the other has one slot. I designed in a strip that closed each one of the slots so that they would keep their nice precision plasma cut widths during welding. After the welding was done, I cut off the connectors and finished things on the mill.
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