Ben

T slotted cross slides appear very regularly on EBay – mostly for Myfords of various flavours, but also other lathes. You will probably find it cheaper to explore that route rather than getting a custom slide made. You will need to try and get some dimensions for other lathes to compare to your machine though. An alternative that might work could be to make a "sub-table" or milling table to fit onto your existing cross slide. The easiest way to fit the table to your machine would probably be by drilling and tapping some suitable mounting holes in your cross slide to hold the sub-table, or if you don't want to drill, could you clamp a sub-table to your slide. The sub-table could be made from steel or aluminium plate with either built up T slots or holes drilled and tapped to suit the job that you want to hold. An advantage of the sub-table route is that it could be made by hand rather than machining and you could make tables with different hole/slot patterns to suit individual jobs.

Just some thoughts on other possibilities.

Keith

Ben,

If you are happy with the idea of a sub-table; have a look at the C6 item on this page from Arc … it looks very adaptable.

MichaelG.

You could fabricate one using the techniques proposed by Martin Cleeve many moons ago. I made a tee-slot cross-slide for my mini-lathe using this technique,see:

http://mikesworkshop.weebly.com/tee-slot-cross-slide.html

Mike

Which is best for general purposes – T slots along the length or cross wise ?

Michael Williams .

Which is best for general purposes – T slots along the length or cross wise ?

That's a very good question Michael!

A good argument for going down the sub-table route, you can have both or a mixture using different sub-tables.

Keith

Photo lower front right shows a custom made milling cross slide for a Myford S7 with T slots both ways.

I support the last post for John Ward. I bought a slotted crsoss-slide from him some years ago and it was very well made and half the price of another well known firm.