HINTS & TIPS

The Kits
“The first kit I completed was the GHT Rear Tool Post. My passion was woodwork but I had just inherited a very old lathe from my Uncle and was slowly but surely getting hooked. The lathe was branded RDMES on the headstock and no one I knew had ever heard of it (including www.lathes.co.uk). In size it was around 3 ½” above and 13” between and had a T-slotted boring table similar to a Myford ML7. For parting off, I had generally chosen the hacksaw! This was in preference to my front-loaded parting blade, which 9 times out of 10 dug in and scared the living daylights out of me!

I found cutting my first casting to be a very pleasurable experience. From memory, the casting fits beautifully in a 6” 4-jaw chuck and you take slow, interrupted cuts with a single point tool. I grew an immediate respect for my tired old lathe. To get the 7º down angle on the Archibald head cost me about £100 for a Chinese vertical slide. This, together with the cost of the kit and the 20 novice hours that I invested, make my Rear Tool Post worth around £300 ($500)! However, everything that GHT intended came true. As suggested in the instructions, I set up a length of 1” bar and parted washers off in one continuous action at around 200 rpm. Maybe little things please little minds but to achieve this in my own basement made me smile on the inside for a month! I didn’t try the GHT turret, the Riley one seems much more useful. I fit an upside down 90º carbide tipped chamfer tool alongside the parting. This lets me index a 45º chamfer in seconds.

4 years later, my workshop now boasts a peak condition, 1953 Myford Super 7, an Astra universal miller from the 60’s and a host of attachments. Still a wage slave, I manage maybe 8 challenging hours a week in the workshop. I’m working on a couple of very interesting projects but I look forward to biting off a Worden Kit between now and Christmas.”

Kirk Burwell
Bridgnorth, Shropshire