Taper setup with a boring head

[Christophe Mineau]

I think it is Marv who is the precursor of this method for turning tapers on the lathe using a boring head in the tailstock.
Many thanks to him for this clever idea !

I wanted to give it a try in order to turn some taper mandrels that I needed, and I decided to make some accessories to it :

A small live center with cylindrical shank that will fit the boring head :




It's made of a stack of a bearing stop and a couple of ball bearings



A pair of spherical centers, re-using the ball tool I already showed yesterday.



And also a couple of Lathe Dogs, two different diameters :




And here is the complete setup :
Turning a reference cylinder :

Offsetting :

Turning the taper :

And finally a shearing tool showed here to finish the cone. (This tool is really wonderfull !)

[charles scozzari]

Great work and idea. Gathering parts right now for my own attachment, thanks to your idea, hope you don't mind my using your idea.

[thehomeengineer]

What a great idea.
With simple maths knowing the length of bar and taper required the offset is simple to calculate. I guess the only thing is to ensure the boring head movement is in the same plan/true to the lathe bed otherwise when adjusting the required offset a compound angle occurs and will hinder the accuracy of using the boring head to set the taper.
This method is certainly a lot cheaper than buying a commercially made taper turning attachment even if you bought all the items new you would be nowhere near the cost and for most we don’t often need to cut long tapers?
Thank you for sharing
The Home Engineer

[Ralphxyz]

Nice, thanks for posting.

Ralph

[Christophe Mineau]

Great work and idea. Gathering parts right now for my own attachment, thanks to your idea, hope you don't mind my using your idea.

Hi folks,
Thank you for the kind words, but again, the actual paternity of the original and genius idea of using a boring head in that context is to be attributed to our friend Marv Klotz (mklotz), and I got this idea from an old post from 2010 on another forum , and that post was already attributing the idea to "our" Marv, famous man already.

I can just claim for the paternity of the different accessories that go with it in this post

[DIYer]

Thanks Christophe Mineau! We've added your Lathe Dogs to our Lathe Accessories category,
as well as to your builder page: Christophe Mineau's Homemade Tools. Your receipt:

Lathe Dogs by Christophe Mineau

tags: lathe, support

[DIYer]

Thanks Christophe Mineau! We've added your Live Center to our Machining category,
as well as to your builder page: Christophe Mineau's Homemade Tools. Your receipt:

Live Center by Christophe Mineau

tags: centering