Stub / Short Morse Taper Centres?

[DTR]

Morning all,

I'd like to to replace the original drive and dead centres on my rather old lathe. Admittedly I haven't measured the exact taper, but they look very much like 1MT, only shorter. Unfortunately the sockets in the head / tailstock are correspondingly short so I can't just use a standard centre. Just to confirm the taper, tonight I will try the centres in my engineer's lathe. I found out recently that apart from the standard MT sizes that we know and love, there were also some oddball sizes.....

Does anyone sell stub MT centres, or will I have to resort to cutting a standard one down (assuming the shank isn't hardened)?

Thanks

 

[chipmunk]

If you have an engineering lathe and the originals why not try cutting your own tapers from BMS?
There's no need to make drives from anything harder and if you're making your own you can make a more exotic Steb-like centre with either a fixed or sprung point.

There's some great instruction here on machining tapers... http://www.homews.co.uk/page47.html
...and it's not that difficult once you have your topslide set correctly.
In fact shorter tapers are easier than long ones IME.

Once you have everything spot on, take my advice and cut a few so you have a few by you when you need them.

Rather than dead centres, you can make your own basic live centre too with a couple of cheap bearing races of the same size. The taper needs a stub to match the internal diameter of the bearing races and the live part is machined so it just fits over the outside of the two races.

HTH
Jon

 

[DTR]

Tbh, the price of a new, bog-standard drive centre is cheap enough that I'm not that motivated to make one. I will if I have to, but I'd rather just cut down the taper of a shop-bought centre

 

[woodpig]

The tanged centres I've used seem to be hard so you may have to cut one down with a grinder. The plain ones have been softer for some reason, perhaps because of the draw bar thread inside? Let us know how you get on.

 

[DTR]

The tanged centres I've used seem to be hard so you may have to cut one down with a grinder. The plain ones have been softer for some reason, perhaps because of the draw bar thread inside? Let us know how you get on.

Hmmm, pineapple. Thanks for the info. I have a newish MT2 centre that I bought for the engineer's lathe; I'll see how soft that is, and if suitable try to remember where I bought it!

 

[marcros]

dave,

old thread, so sorry. I think that I have the same issue on my boley- 1MT but a short form. Did you find a solution?

Mark

 

[Rorschach]

I have not seen many stub tapers for sale and if I do they are often much more expensive than your standard size. When I needed one in the past I just bought a standard and trimmed it with the angle grinder, 5 mins and it was done, quite neatly too.

 

[MusicMan]

old thread, so sorry. I think that I have the same issue on my boley- 1MT but a short form. Did you find a solution?

Mark

Mark
Your headstock taper is not a Morse, but a 10 degree Boley collet taper. Your tailstock taper should be MT2 if it is the same as mine, though the tailstock of yours does look rather different. Now, the lengths of the tapers ARE critical in the tailstock if you want to use the self-eject mechanism. I of grind my centres/tools down by about 1 cm till this works properly.
Keith

 

[DTR]

Mark,

It looks like MusicMan's answered your question, but my solution was to turn my own.