Can anyone explain to me why everyone seems not to have their compound slide square to the cross slide, and why, if you grind up your tools to the correct angles or use tipped tooling, do you always swing your QCTP around the place rather than being perfectly square to the job, as Doubleboost shows on his lathe, which the tools are designed to be used at.
I use my compound a lot for taking accurate cuts off a face, or turning stepped shoulders in conjunction with a saddle stop, which you can't do, without resorting to calculations of angles.
The only time mine goes off square is when I am either taper turning or thread cutting, or when I require very fine feeds for toolpost grinding. So really I don't need the extra handle on top that everyone seems to crave for. I just use a normal spanner on the nut on the rare occasion it is called for.
It might just be me, but you seem to be losing one half of your quickly set accurate settings by moving things around so much, and you are also not presenting the cutting tools to the job at the correct angles. Maybe that is why there is a plethora of people having troubles with such things as parting off and bad surface finishes, or even just getting down to accurate sizes.
Or is it being done because you don't grind up the correct tools for the job in the first place, and are trying to make one tool do the job of several?
This has baffled me for many years why so many people do it this way.
