I have never been happy with the surface finish from my Hercus 9C.
It is OK on parallel turning Aluminium, but steel varies a lot.
As does facing off. Parting off is a crap shoot.



Ignoring the obvious, and hard to fix things for now
(badly worn bed Vs, cross slide dovetails and feed screw/nut),
I thought I would try to stabilise the tool post.


My compound slide casting is sad.
Missing a lot of casting, from years of school student abuse.
Which means there is a lot less surface for tool post to sit on/clamp onto.

In a perfect world, I would machine up a new one from a nice block of 4140 steel,
but who has the material, time, or motivation for that?

Time for some surface grinding. The frst thou removed showed a lot of wear in the middle, and on the mangled chuck side:
IMG_2216.jpg

Roughly another 5 thou off:
IMG_2223.jpg
and it's starting to get there.

That is all I dared to remove, because the T slot is modest, maybe 1/4" or 7/32" at the thin step?




So, I'll mount it back, and try some test cuts in steel, to see if there is any improvement.


Probably not, which means the next step would be to replace the compound with a solid block.
Attached Images




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