This Oughtta Give Irish The Giggles

In case you have been hiding under a rock somewhere, our favorite Feral Irishman, who recently went over 12 Meeeeelion page views, does machine work for a living.

Serious business that.
Expensive tools, expensive equipment and the knowledge acquired from a lifetime of turning big and nasty chunks of metal into shiny new parts that come damn near to being artwork when he is done.
We're talking major league skills here.
To say I am envious of those skills would be a bit of an understatement.

The guy is a prince of a fella though,just an awesome dude, and I am very privileged to be on the guy's Blogroll.
I couldn't even tell you how many visitors I get from him but it's a shit ton.

Anyways, I was thinking of him just a few minutes ago while I was out in the garage fucking with that damn Chinese Mini Lathe again.

I bet he would laugh his ass off watching me dick around with this stupid thing.

To start with, about the only thing he would have a use for this piece of crap thing would be is as a door stop.

But hey, it's what I got and it keeps me out of the taverns, plus I am learning new shit every time I mess with it.

You see, even though I have been a mechanic for forty fucking years, I have always been a "Get A Bigger Hammer" kind of guy.
You know, pound it to fit and then paint it to match.

Fucking around with these little needle dick bug fucker things is not something I am used to.
Sure, I have built a few engines in my day, I know about these magical things called " thousandths of inches" but they were few and far between doing what I normally did.

So today I was out there attempting to do yet another upgrade on the damn thing.
The tolerances machined into these mass produced little clap traps are, shall we say, less than ideal.
Irish would probably tell you that there is enough slop in the fuckers to throw a cat through.

I found this one guy named Steve Jordan on Youtube who is a absolute wizard when it comes to these damn things and he has the coolest little tiny machine shop crammed into an 8X10 shed out in his back yard that you wouldn't believe some of the things he does with.
He has a tutorial on how to upgrade the Cross Slide on these things to absolutely eliminate the slop they come with from the factory so I went and ordered a bunch of stuff and raided the local hardware store for everything else I needed to tackle this little project.

Of course when I try to do these things a cascading comedy of errors is soon to follow.
This one was no exception.

Thankfully I am quite aware of my shortcomings thank you very much and I tend to get extra shit whenever I start in on these kinds of projects.
This is usually a good thing and today was also no exception.
I wound up fucking up a piece of brass even though I had the parts clamped together and used the recommended drill bit from the video.
I also put the studs in the wrong holes and had to take them back out and move them to the other side because I wasn't paying attention to the fact I was working on the piece upside down.

Ahh, the learning process.

But in my defense, I do believe that I am pretty close to getting it done, using somewhat primitive methods in that mess of a garage I am still trying to get stuff pared down in.
Here be pictures of what I have been rambling about.

This is the cross slide with the original cast iron gib strips and the garbage hardware they attached it with laying there.

I had already put the studs in before I remembered to take a real crappy picture.

Here it is after cutting and drilling new Brass gibs with a spacer plate on the back.

After I get some machining done on the thick Brass plate and then get it back on the ways I will have to tighten things up and then use a dial indicator to tell me how much I am going to have to shim the front.
After I get the shimming done then I will put it all back on, snug up the Nylock Nuts, back them off 1/4 turn from underneath and that should pretty much be the end of it , forever.
Or at least until I am long fucking dead and someone else gets to play with it.
It is supposed to tighten things up to within one, maybe two, of those magical thousandths of an inch and it eliminates those little adjusting screws.

That's plenty good enough for ol' Bustednuckles.