Now here’s a head-f**k.

Lang, sorry to say, but the headstock throughhole is one of the most important specs to look at when buying a lathe, and it’s one of the things I look at first when checking one out; along with bed length and swing.

As you’ve found, the through hole allows direct chucking of a tube or roundstock, but size is extremely limited. This is just the nature of the lathe. A reasonable alternative is to use a 4 jaw, which is usually larger than the 3 jaw scroll chuck and will usually give you a larger through hole, but of course this will still be limited by the headstock hole but if the piece you are working is short, you can squeeze by.

As you’ve also found, if headstock limited, the only thing to do is to use the steady. The short fingers you have are soft metal and are designed to be sacrificial, so they wear quickly and are supposed to keep marring of your work to a minimum. In practice, though, the marring is secondary to the change in work to bit distance as the fingers wear in. For the first few jobs you’ll have to adjust the fingers constantly as they wear in, which is very tedious. Really, the way to go if you must use a steady, is with rollers. Rather than convert a steady, I just looked for a good quality roller steady on ebay and bought it, then chopped off the base and reconfigured it to fit my ways. Since the fingers adjust up and down, they can compensate a bit for out-of-center manufacture, so as long as you are close, they’ll work just fine. I recommend a steady from a Leblonde or Monarch or STandard Modern, they come up regularly and are very high quality, in fact the best you can find out there in the used market. I bought one from a Regal and I think I paid just over a hundred bucks a few years back. The only thing you have to watch is that the swing of your lathe matches the swing of the steady you are buying within a little bit; and that the mounting feet on the bottom of the steady are the same type as your ways… note that certain machines like Hardinge and Clausing use different way types and may not be mountable onto other lathes. The most common way type is the flat on one side and the inverted V way on the other. I just cut the entire foot off, then cut down the center to separate the flat from the V, then adjusted the height by chucking a 1″ solid bar and have it also held by the steady; then actually tack welded both feet onto it while it was in place on the bed. While getting the placement exactly right is very difficult due to heat distortion when you weld it up, I got mine close enough that it works very well and final cost was pretty good… materials was less than $125 for me. I called the company and they quoted me $7500 for a new steady for my machine, which is more than I paid for the entire lathe; so I saved quite a bit. (my lathe did not come with any tooling so I had to scrounge or make up what I needed).

aloha,
walt

Can’t you just buy the steady with the bearings already on? Why does the steady only come with those 3 pointy bits of metal, if its designed to hold revolving pieces of metal??

Uh oh, i’ve asked for it now……. 😕

🙄 🙄

At what point do you finally come to the conclusion “…..maybe it’s me”?
How do you ever accomplish anything with the fawken soapbox your always carrying. Put it down every now and then. So many good & informative posts littered with your concieted epics.