Stark no.4 tail stock taper.

[Steve White 6Participant @stevewhite6]

Help!

[Steve White 6Participant @stevewhite6]

Good evening All.

I wonder if there is any body out there that can help me.

I have recently been given a Stark no.4 lathe which has seen much better times. The bedway and tail stock look original, although the barrel lock thread casting is broken, the head stock casting looks undamaged but I think that at some point the spindle, which holds a Burnerd 3" 4 jaw chuck, has been re'manufactured as it is not hollow. The cross slide, top slide and tool post are sturdily home made.

I would like to breath some life back into this old lathe and relearn the gentle art of swarf production, the last time I used a lathe was at college in the late 1960's.

I would like to use the tail stock but it seems that the taper is not mt1, mt2 being too big. I know from reading the web that there are many types of taper but it seems that to use the tail stock I will need an adapter. can anyone help please

Cheers.

Steve.

[Phil WhitleyParticipant @philwhitley94135]

Good evening Steve and welcome to the forum! have a look at http://www.lathes.co.uk/stark/ and have a read! It looks like a well made machine.

Phil

[NIALL HORNParticipant @niallhorn50878]

Stark used a unique collet size. I bought some old collets thinking they were 3C, found they were not and finally identified them from the table in Machinery's Handbook 10th edn. I do not know if the tailstock is the same taper, but it could be one of the Brown and Sharpe ones – they vary by smaller increments that Morse.

I did advertise them and got no takers – if they are of any interest send me a PM and you can have them for a charitable donation to Tools For Selfreliance.

Niall

[NIALL HORNParticipant @niallhorn50878]

You could also consider the Jarno taper series – they also have smaller increments than the Morse series.

Niall

[Adrian R2Participant @adrianr2]

Find some lengths of ground steel rod with nice perpendicular ends, or perhaps the blunt ends of a decent set of drill bits, poke them in the taper and then plot the various depths and diameters on a piece of paper*; do this enough times until you get a straight line then calculate the angle and big and little end sizes.

Some common and less common taper dimensions on Wikipedia here to compare with, a similar exercise for my lathe spindle identified it as Brown & Sharpe No 6.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machine_taper

*or spreadsheet and chart if you are digitially minded.

[Michael GilliganParticipant @michaelgilligan61133]

Others have trodden this path , Steve

… it may be worth reading this: **LINK**

https://www.practicalmachinist.com/vb/antique-machinery-and-history/new-me-stark-4-lathe-153276/

MichaelG.

[Howard LewisParticipant @howardlewis46836]

Unlike Morse Tapers, all sizes of Jarno Tapers are of a constant angle From memory, 2 degrees 15 minutes?

Howard

[old martParticipant @oldmart]

I wonder if there is enough wall thickness in the quill to use a MT2 reamer on? The tailstock would have to be set exactly in line with the axis first.

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