I have just spent an hour or two googling megajolt.

My head hurts

:D :D
Quite straight forward realy. Even easier if you are using a CVH or Zetec engine ( No need for a trigger wheel as it is already there )


Ash

Some more first class work from your project :cool:

Perhaps I could set mine up in the lathe & use it as a RPM indicator ( The speed markings went many moons ago !!?? ) :D

ronnie you can actually get little toothed wheels that go on the back of the headstock with a little optical sensor and digital read out. they are really good for converting older lathes to digital read out. i have got to the point where i dont really need the read out on the lathe but it is allways handy

Looking great Ash - you're certainly ploughing on with your build - keep the updates and the pics coming.

Cheers

Dave

Oooohh that sound interesting Ash

Being a complete novice with all things lathe related, I need all the help I can get. :o :o

I do suprise myself at times though, I do manage to do what I set out to do in the end & without any tooling breakage. :confused: :)

what bugs me is that i allways manage to kill the expensive carbide tooling but never the cheep hss stuff.

Ash

Hope i'm not teaching you to suck eggs, but using carbide tooling on a small lathe is very difficult - they like big hard heavy cuts and generally when cutting below about 10thou they tend to rub rather than cut. Small lathes tend to lack the rigidity to take the loads so you better off with HSS. The one exception to this is I tooled out my little CNC lathe with some tipped tooling but got inserts with 0.1 and 0.2mm nose radius. These are fantastic and are razor sharp to touch - I can take half thou cuts with them. So if you do want Carbide tooling I suggest you go for the smallest nose radius possible.

Cheers

Dave

i don't normally use carbide on the little lathe as its not worth the cost. i normally kill them on the big lathe doing silly things that they haven't been designed for :D the problem is that the big lathe lives somewhere else at the moment as i don't currently have space for it. this means most little jobs get done on the mini lathe but take double the time. the big lathe is a 36ich harrison that can quite easily manage 4mm cuts if i had it wired up on 3 phase. it currently has a 3hp single phase motor in it but i will change it back when it goes in my new workshop that i plan to build after the roadster :D

I found that with my lathes.

The carbide tooling was rubbish on the mini lathe, but works quite nicely on the Myford.

I treated myself to one of those indexable boring bars, with a 12mm shaft - can actually take a proper cut with it.

Hogging out the centres on my mushroom inserts took ages with the little lathe (hours), 25mins on the myford!!

i didnt bother turning my hub inserts. i managed to buy them in for less than the cost of the material from mnr.

i only tend to use the lathe when i cant buy something off the shelf or if i already have the material kicking around.