I appreciate all the help and suggestions. I've been busier than I like to be but now have time and tooling to get back to the lathe project. everyone seems to agree that I need more feed and depth of cut to avoid the bird nests. Funny someone would mention an Atlas lathe as that was my first machine tool. I put new spindle bearings in it and someone had inscribed a date on the face of the outer race and as I recall it was 1942.
The chucking problem was soft jaws. I took a washer and clamped the fixed jaws down on it, bored the OEM soft (steel) jaws and all was well. I did run into one little problem. When I stomp on the foot pedal and the chuck closes I don't always have the bar (6061) positioned on dead center. The result is that 2 of the jaws like to capture the bar on the way closed and scar it up in the closing process. I'm sure this will not be a problem when feeding the bar through a spindle liner but what do you do when you are putting slugs into the jaws from the front?
The machine came with 3 of Haas' 1" ID tooling blocks. Are these available from several suppliers or are they proprietary to Haas?
Vern  |