As a Chartered Professional Engineer, I get little opportunity to get my hands dirty in the workplace. In order to satisfy my desire to actually make stuff, I have built up a home workshop centred around a Denford Viceroy TDS 1/1. GB lathe. Work and family commitments severely limit the opportunities to get quality workshop time but I do enjoy the challenge of designing something that I then get to make. I specifically aim to explore and extend the limits of my own skills and the capabilities of the tools to hand. To that end, I designed and made the live MT3 tailstock spindle to stretch my amateur workshop engineering skills and add another lathe accessory to my collection. In order to achieve a finished dimension to within the specified tolerances, it was essential to be able to accurately measure the arbor diameter. For the purposes of this article, three different measurement instruments were applied and the results compared. These were a: 1. Mitutoyo 25mm Digimatic micrometer (specified resolution 0.001mm /.00005") 2. standard Mitutoyo 1 inch micrometer (specified resolution 0.001 inch/0.0254mm) and 3. 6 degree taper combined with the sacrificial arbor extension (estimated resolution +/-0.1mm).
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