Adjusting the gibs, along with tramming the head to the table, is one of those final adjustments the owner is expected to do. Here's how I did it. The gibs exist to take-up the slack in the dovetails. If they are too tight, you wear the dovetails excessively. If they are too loose, the table flops around in the breeze. This is something you need to take some time with and get right, but the good news is that after they are adjusted that setting should be good for a long time.

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On my SB 10K, the nut used to tighten-down the steady rest is sometimes awkward to reach. It's obvious that SB intended the use of the tailstock wrench, unfortunately over the years the original nut was lost and replaced with a modern 7/16-14 HD nut. The tailstock wrench is 25/32 and it's been a long time since you've been able to buy a nut that size. Well, I have a lathe and a mill that just happens to have a rotary table installed so this seems like a good time to make some nuts.

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I bought an older Jacobs 14N Super Chuck off of Ebay a few years ago. The chuck was in great shape with virtually no wear, but wow was it hard to turn: very gritty. I finally decided to pull it apart and clean it. I made some custom arbor spacers on the lathe so the actual chuck disassembly was quite easy. My press, Big Orange, had no trouble separating the chuck parts.

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I like using stops for repetitive operations and the one on the quill can come in very handy. Unfortunately, like most mills and drill presses the stop is just a knurled nut and it can take quite a few twists to get it into position. Quick adjusting nuts are available, but almost all of them are for SAE threads and all the threads on this mill are metric. The project is to make a new threaded rod for a quick-adjust stop nut.

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Made a indicator holder from a casting kit from Model Lathe Engineering (MLA-8). My lathe doesn't have a DRO and probably never will, so for precision X movement I usually use a Shar's magnetic-backed dial indicator reading off the saddle. It works great, but sometimes it would have been nice to have the extra movement a 2" indicator provides. Unfortunately, I found that using a magnetic back on this indicator doesn't work well because the long stem interferes with the lathe's gear box.

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For my next mill project I will need to use a slotting saw. The blades were bought on Ebay a few months ago, but I still needed an arbor so I made one today. And here it is completed.

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I recently finished installing an X power feed on the G0678 mill and I took a bunch of pictures. This power feed came from Enco when they had their latest sale. It's marked made in Taiwan, seems nicely made and was $225 shipped which is a pretty good deal (Those were the days!). Here's the stock hand wheel and dial arrangement on the G0678 mill. This mill is a bit different then it's other 6x26 cousins in that the dial rests on the hand wheel.

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Found some more pictures of some work I did last week on levelling the mill. It turns out the threaded holes in the bottom of the casting are 1/2-13 which makes finding levelling hardware easy. After chasing the holes with a tap to clean them out and making sure they were well oiled it was time for the levellers. I bought this set at Amazon, but McMaster's and other sources have the same thing.

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Well, I have been sitting on these pictures long enough so here's a post about my new mill, a Grizzly G0678. It's a 8x30, variable-speed knee mill. A little background. I've been shopping for a mill since the day after I bought a 1974 South Bend 10K lathe. I couldn't handle a Bridgeport-size mill in my tiny shop, but wanted something a bit bigger than the G0704 that popped-up on CL 5 miles down the road.

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I would like to thank Mr Frazier for posting this project in a forum as I found this bit of lathe tooling to be very helpful and quite a time/frustration saver. I don't have a mill yet, so drilling accurately through a bar can take quite a bit of time to set up on the drill press, but with this tool it's so much easier as you start already on center and perpendicular to the work.

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