Apparently this full time job thing doesn’t leave a lot of time for blog updates…

I bought a tiny lathe! This is a Taig Micro Lathe – not even a Micro Lathe II, I believe. It’s the old style with split headstock, which dates it slightly. The plan is to do it up (it actually looks in good nick, albeit covered in sawdust), and tweak it and make tooling for it to get a fair degree of precision for small stuff. ER collet chuck, etc.

To that end – my first ever dovetail!

That was certainly educational. Two main lessons, one technical, one philosophical. The technical one is that you really need to nail that depth before trying to match the actual tails. If you’re off on the depth when you get the tails right, you’ve got nowhere to go. The philosophical one is that it doesn’t need to be that close…

See?

Almost there… I need to make proper depth nuts, and then slit the body to actually get clamping, but then I’ll have a home made quick change toolpost! Then I can build a toolpost grinder for it.

Tiny lathe has a tiny chuck, which is now cleaned and shiny, and tiny lathe itself is a bit cleaner now. That’s a rotary table with brand new T-slot nuts, courtesy of less-tiny mill. One day I’ll stop making tooling and make .. .something else, I guess.

But not today. Hammers! The large one is for tapping things around on the mill and in the vice. The slightly smaller one is for the same, with more delicate things. The tiny one is because apparently I am assembling a tiny workshop, with tiny tools.

See?