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.