I got the Andy Lofquist castings for his combination ball turner & boring bar holder (his model MLA-13). It is sized for SB9 and Atlas, and somewhat larger, lathes. The castings are, as with all of his castings, of very fine quality and design, and they make up into what would be an especially rigid, solid setup. They come with 6 oversize sheets of detailed drawings and some text sheets of machining instructions. So it seemed that this would be a great project for use with my 12" Clausing. There turned out to be a problem, however, one that I should have but did not look into beforehand, and that had to do with the fact that the ball turner is designed for mounting to the top surface of the crossslide and engaged in its dovetails, a perfectly reasonable design arrangement that promotes stability. My Clausing, however, has the compound sitting on the crossslide with its circular track a fair distance off from the spindle axis of the lathe, and the limitation of crossslide movement in Y does not bring it close enough to the lathe axis to be able to use it as a mount for the ball turner as designed. The top of the crossslide has no dovetail grooves. There are ways, as there always are, to modify things by altering part dimensions, making special mounts, drilling into the crossslide, etc. to make the ball turner fit, but these are extensive mods and I am not going to tackle them. The net result is that I am, regrettably, not going to use these castings.
The purpose of this note is simply to call attention to a limitation of this casting kit that may be a serious one for owners of 12" Clausing lathes and other machines not designed to accommodate the base mounting system of the ball turner as designed. I would like to add that from my experience with a number of other casting sets of Andy's, I am absolutely certain that if this kit is used with machines for which it was designed, it will be an excellent and useful piece of lathe tooling.
-Marty-
