Member postings for Oliver Dudley

I have a Mk1 Master that I bought about 12 years ago for 200 quid. I put a new motor and inverter on it and used it for bits and pieces. It was always very noisy (a couple of the gears in the headstock are very badly worn) and I struggled to make accurate parts over any real length. About a year ago I had a proper look at it and found the bedways for the saddle and its accompanying groove were badly worn, the saddle was almost 1mm lower on the left hand side!

I recut the 45 degree vee on the milling machine to make it the same depth all the way along, and DIY reground the saddle vee by making a sled that ran on the tailstock ways and a jig to hold a grinder at the right angle. I kept going until the vee was a consistent height all the way along. Before I started it was cutting about a 0.15mm taper over 150mm, now it cuts about a 0.02 taper over the same 150mm near the chuck, which is good enough for me.

I solved the noisy gearbox by making a new belt drive to bypass it entirely. I made a couple of poly-v pulleys on the lathe as it was, and remounted the motor higher up. They are both stepped pullleys so I've got a 1.5:1 and a 4:1 ratio, in practice it will put a 25mm drill through steel on the 1.5:1 ratio on a slow speed from the inverter, so I have little use for the other ratio.

It's a 60 year old machine that most people would scrap, but with a little tinkering it's good enough for what I want to do now!

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