I’ve seen a few possibilities for purchasing potentially very useful tooling recently but for reasons of economics and priorities I’ve not been able to take them all up. One thing I did do though was to buy a number of collets specific to the Smart and Brown lathes made by Crawford collets. They are numbered 2804 and not easy to find… my lathe was probably made somewhere in the 1950’s.
Anyway, a little advance but since I am spending so much time scraping the slideways (almost 0.010″ off the second top slideway now but a lot of alignment work to go), it’s encouraging to be able to improve the possibilities of it’s usefulness when it’s finally rebuilt.
Richard,
Half the frustration of having your ”home” shop is knowing that there is a quicker, more economical way to do something, but not being able to go down that road because of a lack of funds.
Elation is finding, at a price that you can afford, what’s needed to do a better job.
But for some reason, it is seldom that the two happen at the same time. Must be some rule about this——
Herb Kephart
Hi Herb,
Absolutely. There are odd times when you stretch the budget to buy something which simply doesn’t turn up at the right time, but if you relax the criteria for doing that too much you would just end up in trouble (or I would!). It all has to be sustainable…
Richard