FYI: s'more videos

[Tony]

of all the masterly crafted, oscar-award-winning, and most importantly, modest videos I've put on
the 'tube, i noticed over the weekend that my 30 second silent movie on my taper attachment has
hands down the most views and comments.

thought i'd do a more of a spoon-fed follow up: http://youtu.be/URvGjZ_mhto

secondly (and more exciting! ): i did some reshaping of my log splitter wedge on the metal shaper.

every time i use my shaper I wonder why I don't use it more often.

this vid's a little more hit/miss as I
broke the camera out when I was already 1/2 way done..
but what they hey: http://youtu.be/Bn1Z6kw_tlA

[RussZHC]

Morning Tony, or it is sort of morning here...while I am guessing the intention was to show your shop made taper attachment this video also serves very well indeed as a primer on general taper attachment use, function and design. Very well done.

In the video you are copying a known taper and by use of the dial indicator setting the angle of taper which could then be cut, would one method of determining some "unknown" angle (as in not copying a part with a known, reliable taper) be to install a known true cylindrical piece (say a chunk of TPG steel, turned/polished/ground) and using mathematics of triangles and the dial indicator adjust until the needed angle was obtained?

[Tony]

my bad, thanks for catching the mistake Russ. Link has been fixed.

Nothing to write home about.. though, i like to speed up "the dull parts" and watching a shaper
develop a surface at 8X normal operating speed is something magical. Like when you see
those nature videos of blooming flowers. sort of.

if you watch close you'll also note how far off my milled surfaces actually were! you'll see the
shaper start cutting on one side first and the surface slowly develop. not critical on a log
splitting wedge, but it appears my mill vise isn't quite as square as I thought. Though perhaps
some of the welding that happened afterwards could've had a hand, too.

and yes, good point, you could use the taper attachment to check other tapers. meaning
you set up for a reference taper, then put in your unknown (meaning the one you'd want to
check, hopefully you'd already know what its *supposed* to be), and see how close it matches.

if I'm reading you right, though, I don't think you'd need any math. if the indicator doesn't say
zero, then the taper is off.

if you are using math (holy smokes!) then you probably don't need the taper attachment.
basically zero your dial, move, say, 3" with the carriage, and read the indicator again.

heck even then you might not need to do any math as you could probably use sine bar tables
for 3" sine bars!

[RussZHC]

Yeh, sine tables may be the thing...my math skills with trig are pretty weak...was thinking that if you move the indicator say an inch along said turned/ground/polished bar and the indicator read change of say a tenth of an inch you could now relate that to (a) slope, as in rise over run, (b) a given number of degrees. So you could adjust to an angle without a series of indicator marks on the taper attachment itself.

Now that I think about it a bit more, you could get a long throw indicator, say 2", fix it at a known reference point on the rear of the lathe (somewhere along the length where the taper attachment was fixed to the lathe bed) and for a given distance the angled round was away from said reference point, the indicator would have a certain specific reading. That side of the triangle of a given length (side the indicator was "measuring") would mean a taper of a given number of degrees (since you know the point where the round bar is fixed and the length along that round bar to the point where the indicator tip would meet it). I think I got that right...and I think that is a sine bar, more or less?