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brendan stemp
10th March 2009, 04:30 PM
I do a lot of boring or drilling on my lathe and find the winding in and out of the quill time consuming. I'm hoping I can find a quicker method to move the quill in and out. I once spoke to someone who had a lever action on his tail stock which meant he could simply control the quill movement with the pulling of a lever rather than winding the tail stock wheel. Has anyone got one of these or knows of someone who has. I would like to get something made up and would like some system that is tried and proven rather than of my own design. Any help would be appreciated. Brendan

turnerted
10th March 2009, 04:35 PM
Brendon
Have a look at a Ledy lathe .I think they all have this design feature .

Ted

NeilS
10th March 2009, 04:50 PM
That's Leady with an 'a', see here (http://members.ozemail.com.au/~kjeeves/leady/lathe/lathe.html).

Neil

bobsreturn2003
10th March 2009, 05:38 PM
Have one on my lathe . You need to make a whole new tailstock to get them to work . But they save time have a big handle with crank on the woodfast nearly as good , cheers bob

new_guy90
10th March 2009, 07:10 PM
google stuff for home metal machinist, its more useful for metal lathe when you need to do heaps of reaming and tapping. to be honest i hate the idea but thats just me, i think a rack and pinion wheel where you can get that nice pressure and feel just like a drill press but thats far more complicated.

to change it to a leaver action i not as hard as it looks all you need to do is

replace the hand wheel

play with the quill

make a bracket and leaver

and your done, you just need to have access to some metal working gear but you should be able to do it with out getting anything machined (it will be easy if you have access to a miller and lathe to play on) oh and have a play with where the leaver is (make it above or below the quill not in the middle) because if you cant put the knock out bar in the quill theres no point in using it for drilling as it would save no time. here is a link that explains it for a small metal lathe but i think you could change some stuff for a wood lathe
http://www.kinzers.com/don/MachineTools/lathe_projects/tailstock/lathetailstock.jpg


well thats my 2cents hope it helped

Patrick

Jim Carroll
10th March 2009, 07:55 PM
Brendan the quill and handwheel are not designed for continual drilling as the wear plate in the tailstock wears out the groove in the handwhell with the continual pressure used in the drilling process.

You are better setting up a jig on your drill press and do the drilling there.
You could still put the peice in your chuck and set it up on a jig on the table and then drill down wards then transfer back to the lathe with the peice still in he chuck.

The other option is to try and track down an old leady lathe and use this for your drilling as they have the lever action tailstock., not sure how much the quill slides back and forth though.

brendan stemp
10th March 2009, 08:08 PM
Thanks everyone. I have a plan now. Not so difficult after all. Patrick your link has given me an idea. I'm sure I can adapt what I have.

new_guy90
10th March 2009, 08:12 PM
Jim makes a good point about the tail stock but come to think of it you shouldn't need to use the hand wheel at all for drilling and i haven't ever needed to do it like that when on a "good" flat bed lathe (i got a single round bed lathe so i have no choice but to use the hand wheel :(() how are you drilling? turning the quill into the work or mooving the tail stock into the work?

sorry but suddenly this all seems so unnecessary

Patrick

ElizaLeahy
11th March 2009, 03:16 PM
I found that if the wood was soft enough I could just leave the tail leaver unlocked and push it in without turning it.

But I guess that doesn't help :)

Jim Carroll
11th March 2009, 05:14 PM
The problem with having the tailstock loose and pushing it through is that the front can tend to lift a bit and cause the drill to go uphill.

Far better to have the tailstock locked then use the handwheel and if more depth required then move the tailstock in.

The same can be done on a drill press the only difficulty is clearing the swarf out of the hole.

brendan stemp
11th March 2009, 06:48 PM
Thanks but I'm not using soft wood and I am using big drill bits. I have, however found that, given the right lathe speed auger bits will actually pull themselves into the wood with light pressure on the tailstock. But I'm not using them all that often either.

Jim Carroll
11th March 2009, 07:33 PM
Brendan you have to be carefull with auger bits that still have the lead screw on them as you have noticed they are designed to pull through the timber.

One way to get around this is to file most of the screw away just leaving the point, this way it still has the point to track it in on centre but should not pull.

If allowed to pull through you could get disasterous results.

new_guy90
11th March 2009, 07:56 PM
I found that if the wood was soft enough I could just leave the tail leaver unlocked and push it in without turning it.

But I guess that doesn't help :)

thats the way i was taught to do it but now i get why the hand leave would be more handy

glad i could help, the hand leave is not very common on any lathe but small high priced production, turrets lathes where they make hundreds of parts and putting tools in and out wasts time...... still a could come in handy

Patrick

RETIRED
11th March 2009, 11:11 PM
There is a way it can be done but it requires a couple of modifications to the tail stock.

I will see if I can dig out the one I made for a Teknatool 3000 and photograph it for you.

Rum Pig
12th March 2009, 08:50 AM
I have a Leady an I find when doing repetitive drilling like 50 pens at once it is the best thing.:2tsup:
If you take the time to set it up right you do not have to move the tail stock at all just in and out with the leaver this leaves me just enough to get the blank out and in with the new one. same when turning the pens, set the tail stock up so you can get your blanks on a nd off your mandrill with a simple push of the leaver.
I would not swap mine for a wind in one:no:

brendan stemp
12th March 2009, 09:34 AM
Jim My experience with the auger bits is that if you get the speed right on the lathe (easy to do with evs) and this probably varies from timber to timber and according to the diameter of bit, then it will feed in nicely with only a little pressure on the tail stock; no winding of wheel required. If the speed aint right the thread is stripped quite quickly in the wood and still no problems. There is a danger of the thread on the auger bit pulling the jacobs chuck out of the morse taper but I haven't experienced this. Problems do arise when using auger bits on pedestal drills when timber isn't clamped down so I understand your comments but my experience with auger bits on the lathe have been nothing but positive.

I look forward to seeing some plans. I think it is an idea worth persueing given the amount of drilling I do. As Patrick and RP suggests it saves a lot of time and probably the tail stock mechanism (as Jim was alluding to)

new_guy90
12th March 2009, 08:03 PM
I have a Leady an I find when doing repetitive drilling like 50 pens at once it is the best thing.

that is exactly what it is meant to be used for, large quantity, repetitive drilling but you dont get that sort of job much on a wood lathe do ya

im coming around to this idea now i mean its easy to do and if it helps why not? and you can change it back easily if you make it right thats one thing the leady lathe cant do

Patrick

RETIRED
14th March 2009, 04:04 PM
Found it in the archives.

You have to remove the hand wheel and retaining plate so that the quill can slide freely.

Use a nut the same thread as the quill and go from there. This was mounted to the tail stock.

It worked very well.

I had another thought that you could rig up a cheap drill press that takes the electric drill (they used to be around a lot) and use that too.