Well, the combination of a day off, foul wind and rain outside, a new set of lathe cutting tools
that came as a Christmas present, plus Douglas's need for a replacement part for his Alford Vice all seemed to come at the right time as an excuse to go and play in the basement with my 1880s Barnes treadle powered lathe. So that's what I have done today.
A long period of happy pottering included much that I did not photograph. I reckon that over 80% of time on my lathe is not actually turning; it's swapping over from one way of holding the work to another or changing tools. I did quite a bit of the work for this job between centres with a lathe dog on the work and a catch bolt on the faceplate, but I don't seem to have taken any pictures of that.
Here the change wheels are in place to give 20 TPI - the big wheel is the one with a couple of cracks in, but it seems to be perfectly strong enough without being mended:
and here is the thread starting to be cut
This picture shows the start of the neck between the threaded part and the tapered part
The thread is protected by wrapping a little bit of lead flashing around it, but the grip is on the bigger round part.
Having cut in and reduced the diameter a bit I needed to round off the ends so swapped to a HSS bit, ground round
To make the square tapered end I thought it would help to make a round taper first. I had measured the angle as being 9°. I could have done this by offsetting the tailstock but I chose the other way - angling the compound slide - as I had not done either method yet.
Here you can see that the part that holds the tool has been slid round to 4.5° short of a right angle, so advancing the cutter by use of the double handle at the left pulls the cutter along at 4.5° to the axis, which makes the taper:
To square off flats on the taper, I didn't use any sort of cunning milling attachment, I just locked rotation up by engaging the back gears and filed horizontally. I then rotated 90°, locked up and filed again
Having done all four, I cleaned them up a bit in the vice (an excellent Record Imp, just right for a job like this)
And so, here's the result, which will be in the post to you tomorrow, Douglas:
It's a bit frustrating that I can't check it for fit, especially as I found out afterwards that the tip had chipped in the cutting:
so the finish was not as good as it could be. If it does not fit, I hope it's close enough for one of Jim's dies to tame it.
So there it is; thanks again Douglas for providing the excuse. (And it does occur to me that a whole lot of leather washers squeezed up together make a brilliant handle, as on Estwing hammers and suchlike; the ability to cut a graded series might inspire a new line of Coates Tools, perhaps?)