Brett Meacle's Morse taper fixture

I used to be considered smart, but now I'm just old. Please can someone put me out of my misery and explain what the thing described on p38 of MEW No 321 is supposed to do, and how? It looks to be nicely made, and is clearly useful, but it's got me beat. Perhaps the explanation has suffered from the typesetter's attention.

It’s a fairly complicated, but very useful device for holding a tapered workpiece in an ordinary chuck … when you are putting tapers on both ends.

The important bit of text … hiding in plain sight … is the word Jacobs

MichaelG.

I haven’t actually seen the page with the description as it takes a few months to get my copy.

The item was sent in as an article recently and then entered in the Stevenson trophy when Neil extended the closing date for entry’s.

The jig is basically a means of holding already made or purchased Morse taper arbors that you want to modify the small end of the long taper.

It started as a one piece design I used when shortening the lengths of the Morse tapers to eject from the tailstock barrel at a certain point.

The 2 part design as shown is for holding the arbor more securely when doing more aggressive work , drilling and tapping a drawbar thread or modifying and existing thread in the higher tensile steels that some purchased arbors come in. The ready made arbor is inserted into the nosepiece, the two parts assembled, the stop screw is adjusted to suit the different sizes of jacobs tapers. This stops the workpiece moving forward and loosening in the holder as a result of the machining forces.

Regards

Brett

Edited By BS Meacle on 25/11/2022 01:03:16

Edited By BS Meacle on 25/11/2022 01:25:28

Michael - that's what I thought it may be, at first, but couldn't see how it could work, so binned that idea, and came up with - nothing...

Brett - thanks for the explanation; it makes perfect sense now that you've explained it's all about machining the ends of tapered workpieces. Neat idea. I don't think you'll be pleased by how your text has been mangled by the MEW production process. I'm sure you didn't write what was printed...

Michael / Kiwi Bloke

Thank you for the kind words.

I have always been impressed at how Neil and the team at MEW have portrayed my work. So I’m sure I will be happy with how it turned out.

The entry in the Stevenson trophy may have been putting the cart before the horse so to speak. But the competition extension gave me the impetus to get a long term project finished. I feel entering the trophy is not about winning but to put ideas out into the world for the betterment of our hobby.

If you have read any of my articles. They are not highly dimensioned blow by blow articles but they are designed to put an idea out into the minds of the readers , to show the inexperienced one possible way of doing a job. They can scale them up or down , modify the design to suit their workshop and needs. When I first started reading MEW many years ago, this is what I had to do as none of the designs of the day matched any of the machines I owned at the time.

Best regards

Brett