Lathe crisis averted

All I wanted was a hole! The next step for the drivers is to make an aluminum collet to hold them while I face their backs, and this was going to start with a hole.

I was merrily drilling deep into that cylinder of aluminum, when the drill bit bound and ripped the tailstock spindle off its guide stud and spun it around. Things happen quickly in machine work, and by the time I’d turned off the lathe, the spindle and screw were unmeshed. Worse, I couldn’t get them together again!

Taking the tailstock apart, I found the threads on both the spindle and the screw were buggered – to use a technical term. That was a good moment to take a break for a day or so, while I considered my options. An email to Sherline tech support (they are excellent, by the way) confirmed that there is nothing special about these threads, and if they looked buggered, it was because they were.

I filled a shopping cart with the appropriate replacement parts, and started preparing myself to take a couple of weeks away from the project. My goal is to present a recognizable locomotive, rather than a collection of parts at the Railway Modellers’ Meet. With a little over two months to go, a couple of weeks away from the project would have assured embarrassment.

However, before hitting the checkout button, I decided to take another crack at fixing the tailstock. It was a battle of attrition, which I won literally millimetre by millimetre, but tonight, with the aid of a specially ground scraper and my trusty needle files, I was able to restore the threads sufficiently to mesh them together again. Hallelujah!