My (now blue) surface plate

I was thrilled to get that gorgeous Starrett Crystal Pink surface plate. I don't think it had ever been used. It seems such a shame to stain the top with blue, and it doesn't come out. But, I didn't get it to look at, I got it to use.

The thing on the surface plate is my dovetail reference. I did have to scrape it to get it perfectly flat before I could use it.

Returning to scraping

It's been a long time since I've had much time to work on the lathe. I had a heavy semester both Spring and Fall and traveled quite a bit last summer. We also replaced the porch last summer, which took up a lot more time than expected, but looks very nice. In the mean time, I was not that happy with my home-made scraper and kept watching eBay for a better one. I did buy a nice hand-made carbide scraper for about $10, but before it even got here I snagged a brand new Anderson scraper, two carbide blades, and one high speed steel blade all together for less than $100. I was thrilled to finally have the right tool.

But, then I tried to sharpen it and had no luck at all. You don't want to hit it with a regular green wheel and sharpening by hand with a diamond stone would take forever and was not seeming make a dent. Finally, I invested in one of those Enco carbide grinders and a diamond wheel. It makes quick work of that carbide. I figure I'll use it for other carbide grinding later on, anyway, so it's a good investment. It has a lot of runout, but that's another story. Anyway, I've gotten the bottom of the cross slide very good and flat, then the flats on the saddle. Next, I launched into the dovetails on the saddle and I have them pretty good, now as well. They are within about 1/10000 of parallel as well. I'll post a picture of how I measured that pretty soon. Next step is the dovetails in the cross slide.