Mini Lathe Cross Slide Mount Enhancement

thingiverse

Kachurovskiy's bearing cross slide mount is a great enhancement. My mini lathe, while looking very similar, turns out to have a significantly different cross slide make up. First off the screw is 12mm so quite a bit bigger. The existing mount also had the mounting screws right next to the screw, not on the little wings as on Kachurovskiy's version. This resulted in a number of tweaks. Firstly I needed to use 12mm x 21mm x 5mm bearings. The 21mm came just above the top of the cross slide bed. I had to mill a 2mm deep 20mm wide slot into the underside of the cross slide to be able to extend the height of my mount. The second thing i needed to do was drill and tap two additional mounting screw holes into the cross slide bed to position the fixing screws away from where the bearings sit. The mode works very well indeed. I was able to accurately set the depth of the back bearing to remove all the slack in the cross slide screw. With good, precise alignment of the screw the back lash adjustment is also far more precise. I have managed to get backlash of the cross slide down to 0.05mm. Thats the best I have ever achieved in this lathe. The only other thing I did was to take 0.25mm off of the back of the gauge wheel ensuring it snugs up on the bearing inner rather than the mount itself.