Compound slide improvement

[mechman48]

Back with another mod,
On my lathe I have found that when using the compound slide, & I have needed to reset zero, the gap between the slide & the handwheel is too narrow for my non too slim fingers to grip the spring loaded calibrated dial so I thought 'got to improve on this'     so having removed the handle I measured up the OD of the knurled portion of the dial for my new adaptators ID, I then machined a piece of aluminium (the correct spelling for our US cousins..check periodic table         ) to an OD of 45mm IIRC. This OD was then knurled to provide a good grip when fitted. I wondered how to fix the adaptor    & considered expanding the aluminium for a shrink fit onto the original dial, not having a blowtorch I opted for the hot water method & duly boiled up some water in my shop 'tea kettle' & plumpt the dial adaptor in for a few minutes, not having the thermal expansion rate for ally' to hand I opted for guesstimate.. no luck.. on measuring the OD of the dial & the ID of the adaptor I found I had mismeasured the ID..  which confims the adage.. measure twice cut / machine once. Onward & upward Geordie I sez; so I decided to go for a press fit (Interference), I  machined the adaptor ID to .003" less than the dial OD.. (ok you purists, I didn't conform to BS4500    but I wasn't fitting bearings    ). I machined up a dolly to fit over the dial boss & using the bench vice, pressed on the finished adaptor..sorted  then just a case of refitting the handwheel to the compound, I can now reset the zero point without having a struggle to grip the dial  simple ..but effective! 
 
1st pic original dial.. the rest follow on.. last pic all refitted to slide..

Cheers
George 

Edit: Reduced photo size. Don
 



 2013-02-10+16.23.34_tn.jpg (61.89 kB, 640x472 - viewed 25 times.)

 2013-02-10+16.22.40_tn.jpg (31.46 kB, 640x479 - viewed 24 times.)

 2013-02-10+16.57.50_tn.jpg (41.42 kB, 640x469 - viewed 23 times.)

 2013-02-10+17.03.27_tn.jpg (62.76 kB, 480x640 - viewed 39 times.)

[mklotz]

...a piece of aluminium (the correct spelling for our US cousins..check periodic table)

Humphry Davy, the Brit who named aluminum, originally wanted to call it aluminum. It was some British twit with probably no scientific credentials at all who decided on aluminium because he thought it sounded better.  Here's the full story from Wikipedia... 

The earliest citation given in the Oxford English Dictionary for any word used as a name for this element is alumium, which British chemist and inventor Humphry Davy employed in 1808 for the metal he was trying to isolate electrolytically from the mineral alumina. The citation is from the journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London: "Had I been so fortunate as to have obtained more certain evidences on this subject, and to have procured the metallic substances I was in search of, I should have proposed for them the names of silicium, alumium, zirconium, and glucium."[63][64]

Davy settled on aluminum by the time he published his 1812 book Chemical Philosophy: "This substance appears to contain a peculiar metal, but as yet Aluminum has not been obtained in a perfectly free state, though alloys of it with other metalline substances have been procured sufficiently distinct to indicate the probable nature of alumina."[65] But the same year, an anonymous contributor to the Quarterly Review, a British political-literary journal, in a review of Davy's book, objected to aluminum and proposed the name aluminium, "for so we shall take the liberty of writing the word, in preference to aluminum, which has a less classical sound."[66]