Now onto a scarier upgrade.
This is the bottom of the main carriage.

The two black strips that you can see screwed to the underneath of the carriage are hardened steel and they stop the carriage from lifting. As you can imagine the needs to be a bit of clearance between these strips and the underside of the carriage to allow it to slide along the bed of the lathe. As delivered this clearance is adjusted and fine tuned by the set screws and locking nuts that you can see between the cap screws. As I understand it these lead to cracking of the hardened plates over time.

I have seen a few ways to over come this but the best way that I have seen is to remove these grub screws and replace them with an appropriate thickness of brass shims. The person I saw who added shims just had lots of bits of shim balanced in between the two surfaces but a Gent in the US improved upon that by making a jig to drill out the shims to match the hole spacing of the main cap screws thus preventing them from being dislodged while being refitted to the lathe.

Next is to replace the cap screws with stainless studs and nyloc nuts and then remove one of the hardened strips and replacing it with a mild steel strip of more substantial proportions.

There are a couple more bit’s of material that I am waiting for so the rest of the description will have to wait until then.

But in the meantime, the next job is to mill out the carriage where the blue blocks are to take the two pieces of square stock in the image these will be screwed to the ends of the carriage in the milled gaps and will form the anchors for the carriage stop.

When I picked up the new lathe and gave it the once over I noted that there had been some upgrades carried out already which rather surprised me that whoever had done it hadn’t fitted a carriage lock etc.
One of the other recommended improvements that people make is to fit a swarf guard to the back of the apron (for those that don’t know what an apron is and I didn’t it’s the gear housing for the carriage hand wheel which also houses the auto feed mechanism). Most people that I have seen make such a cover have done it from thin perspex sheet which works fine but I was delighted when I saw that mine had a brass cover.

I was even more delighted when I took it to bits and found out just how well it had been made. You will also note the grease nipple. Grease nipples have been fitted to all the bearing housings.

Prior to buying the lathe I did quite a bit of research and one of the things that I picked up was that in being made to a price, these Chinese mini lathes lack the rigidity of their bigger higher end ‘professional’ cousins. What quickly became apparent though was that they can be made much more rigid for the outlay of some time and very little money.

What the Unimat had but the Sieg hasn’t, are the means to lock the carriage, cross slide and compound slides. I have already attended to the latter two by drilling and tapping more M4 holes along the Gib strips.

I did the compound slide first, you can see the new holes by the remains of the marker pen that I used for marking out.

Then the cross slide, I didn’t need as many additional screws on this one as it was already supported towards the end of the Gibs

Two screws on each slide wont have lock nuts on them and they will act as the locks when tightened the rest will have grub screws and locking half nuts to position the Gibs to allow smooth travel of the slides.

Prior to Christmas I had decided that the week between Crimbo and the New Year I would spend ironing out the wrinkles with the new lathe.

First I stripped down, cleaned and deburred all my chucks which you can see in the photo of my workbench in the last post.

The lathe came with two 3 jaw chucks (80mm and 100mm) and a 4 jaw chuck.
I have seen a few reviews on YouTube of Chinese import chucks and it seems that although basically sound bits of kit, to keep the price down they don’t do any cleaning or deburring post machining which means that many of them have all the grinding dust present inside which if mot cleaned out will drastically reduce the life of the chuck.

The 4 jaw chuck cannot have been used because when I tried it before stripping it down to clean one of the jaws wouldn’t actually close due to burrs in the slides. I also took the opportunity to strip down and clean another 3 jaw 80mm chuck that I had bought in October with my rotary table for the mill. The latter is actually the best manufactured of all of them needing very little to getting running smoothly.
Next up was the ball handle for the compound/top slide. I didn’t take a photo of it prior to starting work on it but it should look like the one on the left (from the cross slide)

I am not sure if the handle had been broken off at some point or just crudely sawn off but I wanted to replace the handle part. I am pretty sure that I could probably buy a spare from Amadeal but where is the fun in that.
So I made a fixture out of an M10 cap screw a couple of nuts and some washers to hold it securely in the milling vice and drilled it almost to the bottom. I did consider that I might have to drill it right through because I didn’t think that I had an M6 plug tap but I found one in a drawer so I was able to retain the chromed ball.

The plan is to make a handle similar to the other one from stainless steel rod once I get the lathe back together.

A post on Western Thunder asking for photos of members work spaces tempted me to take these and subsequently share them here.

To the right of my first image showing the the bench, the upper cupboard door houses my spray booth and working back from there is a small worktop with my Ultrasonic cleaner and then a sink with drainer taking up the remainder of that wall.