Lathe Alignment Check

Intro

I have been meaning to do this ever since I had the lathe, but never got around to it.

The other day I drove my cross slide into the live center (oops, I meant Z0 not X0!). This has pushed the already suspect tailstock alignment way out. Sieg's tailstocks are crap at best, and I knew I was going to have to address this, but was hoping to put it off till the tailstock lever lock mod got to the top of the to do list. Rich Kruger posted an excellent write up on the Sieg tailstock and it's repair here.

Figured a complete alignment check would make sense. JW Early posted this set of instructions (499KB)to one of his excellent Yahoo knowledge groups. Written by J Latta and originally published in 1955 in Model Engineer.