I am building a Brian Law clock (#22). There is quite a bit of lathe work in it. Of course, being from the UK, it is all in metric. Yes, the drawings have the Imperial units but they are, well, non standard.

Recently I added a compound slide to my Delta 1460. Of course, being older than the hills the dials are calibrated in Imperial. Very messy.

Soooo, I got busy, drew up a metric scale to put over the imperial one. Obviously it does not come out perfectly even, I lose about .04 mm per rev. which is about .0015. Not enough to get me worked up over. I printed them out and added them to the dials with some 77 spray and then covered them with scotch tape for "durability".

mm dial.jpg

All is now right in my world. I knocked out about 15 spacers for the new clock this afternoon, it was a breeze with these. What is really nice is that they are way easier to read than the original ones. Each revolution advances the screw by 2.54 mm. So, forgetting the .04 mm, 2 cranks is 5mm, 4 cranks 10 mm, and so on. The divisions you see in the picture are .1mm (about .0039) so this is very accurate for a wood lathe.

Just thought I would share this. Inkjet printers are very precise instruments. I have used them before to make custom scales. This one took a bit of head scratching though. Diameter of dial X Pi, then figuring out how many mm there were and how to space them properly.