Finally fixing the Coronet-/Rhino-lathe cross-slide

Now this has been one of those tasks that has bothered me for a long while. My lathe's cross-slide was stuck at a weird angle ever since I bought it. Meaning that whenever I used the cross-slide I've cut a three to four degree taper.

As usual I would have expected the bolts to be something weird and wonderful straight out of Whitworth-land, but it turned out to be "just" a set of stainless M12-bolts, which the pre-owner had bought. 

Now if he had taken the time to remove the letters on the bolt-heads, I would probably never have had to take the lot apart. 

A set of fresh bolts, bit of oil and cleaning of the ways where the bolts sit and we've got ourselves a winner.

Which is a typical moment, when the heavy-handedness of the pre-owner reared its ugly head. Now I admit the amount of meat between the dovetails on the inside and the cutout for the hold-downs is rather limited, but the whole lot had fractured all the way over the last fifty or sixty years.

After some very thorough cleaning and with the gib-adjustment bolts removed, I put the whole lot in the vise and used an M8 nut as a spacer to pre-load the broken section.

After taking a deep breath and then turning my tig-welder up to eleven (210 Amps), I floored the pedal and this is where we're at.

As you can see, the crack extended round the corner, so I touched it up from this side as well. Before I did that I could see, that I had (almost) full penetration. The material is only 3-4mm strong at the bottom of the dovetail!

So the precision engineer in me knows that without the correct torque, the dovetail would at least need touching up, but in reality I must have been very lucky, because the cross-slide works all the way with pretty much the same resistance, so there's no loose or tight spots and as such I will call this a proper success!