At some point in the past the lathe saddle was dropped or otherwise damaged, breaking off the rear saddle wings and (I think) at the same time snapped off the lip seen in the picture below on the left edge of the cross-slide.  The lip mates with a notch on the taper slide, locking the cross-slide to the taper slide, which is the means by which the cross-slide is moved during taper operations.

When the cross-slide was repaired, the lip was welded back on.  The welder did a fairly sloppy job, leaving a big chunky bead along the break, so I decided to clean it up a bit.

First I ground down the weld and milled a bit off the top to flatten the surface.  Then I drilled and tapped some 6-32 holes to screw down a 1 1/2" wide strip of 1/8" steel in prep for brazing to reinforce the remains of the old repair.





And I had the usual sort of problem where an innocent 6-32 tapping job turns into a black hole for taps and drills... sigh.  So I drilled out the mess to 7/16, fit a plug, soldered, installed 2 10-32 dutchman screws to hold it together when I finally get to brazing and milled it clean...






The other 3 screws went in OK and I installed the plate, cleaned up and beveled the edges.  The finished plate is assymmetric  to conform with the chewed up side of the slide.  The cross-slide will be put aside until I'm ready to start brazing.  When thats done I imagine I'll take a pass on the mill to clean up the underside of the lip before painting and reassembly.




Next job is the saddle....

;;; eof