Reply To: Ideas anyone?

[Bob Tascione]

Thanks Cornelio,
Links are great..by all means put them up here whenever you have a good one.
I’m gonna order some of those sheets to try them out. I’ll have my son send them down here to us when they get to him. Thanks for the recommendation.
That sketch helps a bunch. The chisel-like graver is a standard graver used for making a linear cut along the stock surface. You can tilt it a bit and draw it along the t-rest surface to make a long cut. I usually grind the end cutting surface back on one side or the other to give it a little relief. You’ll then have 2 angles. The angle that you already have from the top face down and another angle from Right to Left or Left to Right. The nice thing about using hand gravers is that you can often tilt or change cutting angles immediately just by moving your hand. You’ll find that as you do more and more lathe work you’ll end up grinding all kinds of shapes on your gravers and will quickly learn what works for you and what doesn’t. That’s one of the advantages of using tool steel gravers over carbide. They are MUCH easier to grind to different shapes. If you don’t like the shape you have you can change it again and again and again until you run out of graver!

As far as using Diamond paste to polish pivots…not really a good idea as the microscopic diamond pieces will impregnate the steel pivots while polishing. This actually turns the pivot into a very effective cutter which can cut into the brass hole that the pivot rides in. This will wear the hole into an oblong shape…just the opposite effect we were shooting for by polishing the pivot.

Bob