made and interesting new contact

[Cedge]

Last night I stumbled onto an offer for an upgraded head stock for the mini lathe. When I dug a little deeper, I discovered the guy making the offer is located within a couple of miles from me. We spoke last night and we are going to try to meet up this week.

His hobby is upgrading the head stocks for the typical mini lathes with tapered bearings, cast iron gears and more durable spacers. He says he has all the Sieg factory tooling for the job and he hand works the final fine finish on the gears and such. His pricing seems pretty decent and I hope to see his some of his work when we get together.

No specific recommendations at this point, but, if anyone is interested, I'll post more after I've gotten the chance to see things first hand.

Steve

 

[Brass_Machine]

I would like to know more.

Eric

 

[ksouers]

Ditto.
I'm at least curious.

 

[Hilmar]

What lates are we talking about?
Hilmar

 

[John S]

It's a job you can do yourself.

http://www.arceurotrade.co.uk/projects/C3_BC/pages/index.html

 

[Cedge]

I met the guy today and had lunch with him. We then returned to my shop so he could see his first SX3 mill and to have a look at my lathe. After having a chance to see the way my little beast cuts, he grudgingly admitted that his own lathe was not up to giving the depth of cut or finish I'm getting with stock bearings.

I saw one of his modified head stocks and his work looked pretty good. However I'm not ready to have him tackle modifying mine for the time being. I'll reserve final judgment until I've had a chance to run his lathe and see if it's actually worth the investment. For now, I'm neutral with a somewhat negative bias.

I'm very much of the "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" school of days gone by and it's hard to consider mine broken if I'm getting better results, "running stock", than he is with the mod.

Steve

 

[ksouers]

Thanks for the update, Steve.
The time and effort is greatly appreciated.