Reworking an old sportered 6.5X55 96 Mauser. Decently done by the first guy about 30 years ago. It was a budget build, and they did a Fajen stock with the original barrel cut to 22".

Time for some sprucing up. I reworked the stock. Plain walnut, now with a nice macassar tip and a cleaned up monte carlo cheek. It was orignally pretty fat, and very soft looking. Took a lot of wood off the stock to slim it down. Still looks like a Weatherby, though.

Now for a new barrel, still in 6.5X55. Got a nice Shilen #3 blank.

Set up the lathe, get it chambered, start threading in the steady/live center, and the 12 tpi gauge is a little off of the thread I cut. This is still the first pass and a light 5 thou cut. Hmmm. Cut a couple more passes. Looks better on the guage. Get close to finished, and check again. Hmmm. Now it isn't right again. Finsih it since I am so far along, and the action only goes half way. Cut a little more, still only half way. WTF.

Pull out the point micrometer. Thread depth is good. OD of thread is good. I even used a 55 degree tool.

Get frustrated, and move to the other bench. Lean on bench, look at other rifle in the cradle. It is a Weatherby Vanguard that I just re-barrelled.........

Shit!! I left the metric back gear in the lathe.

Cut off tenon, and rethread to correct 12 tpi.

Go back to house, pour glass of beer, relax.

Jeremy

While that sucks.

Bet most of us if were are honest have to admit do something similar f--kups. I know for sure I have.

Like you grab a beer and walk away.

Nice to know I'm not alone in the screw up department.

Dave

It's not so bad on small Colchester & Clausing Lathes and their clones because gear changes are sort of common, so you just get used to double checking the gears. But on the Southbend and their clones, forgetting to flip the stud gear is as common as cooties in your skivvies when you come back from your Thailand adventure. There is one simple trick that I adopted that solved the problem. When I reverse the stud gear to metric I set the gear cover on the end of my bench and it STAYS there until I turn the gear back over to English. The cover has sat on my bench for a day or more some times. But I have never screwed up a thread with metric gears since starting that habit.

Rule #2; never admit anything like this.

Great to see I'm not the only one. Something I do often is spend an hour indicating the barrel in the four jaw and spider. Make the first threading pass, realize I have the wrong gear arrangement, at this point begin cussing. Because on my lathe I need to remove the spider holding the muzzle of the barrel in order to remove the gear cover and change gears. Every time this happens I tell myself to alter the cover so it can slide over the spider. Haven't found the time to do that though

Telling the story is half the fun Tom!

Luckily for me, I don't waste my time with such trivial and less than noteworthy errors. I like to jump in with both feet and sink down to my ears in full blown cluster fucks which which tend to result in mass chaos, havoc, near death experiences and at the very least, severe bodily injury !

I want to get the cookie, when I tell the story afterwards! If I live that is.

quote:

Cut off tenon, and rethread to correct 12 tpi.

Go back to house, pour glass of beer, relax.

Jeremy

Look at it this way, you just lightened up the barrel by cutting off that bit of the thickest part of the barrel.

lets see pics when you are done.

I remember the time fitted a Krieger to a match gun shortly after I offset my tailstock to cut a taper and forgot to set it back before I threaded and chambered it. Funny thing, ehh?

Actually, you were simply allowing for the exponential flex in the barrel due to the tool-press, with the advancement of the thread as it moved away from the tailstock Jim !

I'm working on the logic behind the bell shaped chamber. I'll get back to you on that one.

If you can't dazzle em with brilliance, baffle the fawkers with bullshit!

quote:

Telling the story is half the fun Tom!

Like the time I had bought a short chambered barrel for one of my wildcats. The supplier wouldn't fully chamber because I didn't have gauges. I simply used a formed case. Oops cut too deep so all of a sudden I had an "express" version. Switched to 2.65" cylinder brass and got an extra few FPS.

That's been done to death, on PURPOSE ramrod340!

One of my customers wanted a 6mm, hotdog wildcat that no one else had done, but he wanted it FOR FREE ! Well, next to free because he didn't want to by dies and a reamer. So I drove a 243 reamer in to the same over all length as a 7mm Mauser, plus .020 inch. Sized the necks down on some 7x57s in a 243 Winchester die, dropped in a bunch of dragon dung and seated a bullet with a 243 Winchester die and the 240 Gordie was hatched. 70 grain bullets at 4000 FPS with a barrel life of 600 rounds. You needed our patented, "barrel quiver" for weekend gopher shoots. The expansion at the base was no worse than any factor chambered 243, give or take .0015 inch.

Fifty years past, my journeyman said measure twice cut once.
The tried and trusted quick check for thread pitch,which most of us will know but maybe help the learners.
Before taking that first cut,engage the leadscrew, pencil mark the slide hard against the right hand end of the now engaged carriage. Spin the chuck for the number of threads,say 12tpi, twelve turns, the carriage should now be an inch from the mark on the slide,if not check the train settings.
Takes longer to say it than do it. I constantly have to change from imperial to metric thread work and that means gear train changes as I've only the one lathe these days.

A friend of mine is a good smith in Australia, I was helping him when I lived there and we used a reamer for the 6mm Rem in what was supposed to be a 6mm Rem BR barrel. Barrel ended up about 2 inches shorter than the customer wanted. He wasn't happy, but my buddy had only done about 30 barrels for him so he wasn't going anywhere else.

Customer ordered a Tikka T3 and wanted it to look like a Vietnam era M16. So he built a big chassis for it, and it looked kind of like one. As something like a M16 would have been illegal in Australia. Guy was weird, but his checks didn't bounce.

If I didn't share a little f-up what fun would the forum be?

I started by turning the cylinder section to 1.1" and trimming it back anyway. It got shortened another 0.625", and looks fine. The 1.25" barrels don't look right on small ring actions to me. I'll post a few pics when it is done. Not a showpiece, but a neat rifle with some 60's sporter style to it.

I need a magnet that says METRIC that I can stick to the lathe to remind me.

Thanks everyone for sharing.

Jeremy

Been there.

I made a sign:

"Metric Transpose Gear Installed" with a loop for hanging on the headstock.

Whenever I put the metric gear in I hang the sign. It stays in place until I take the metric gear out.

The road to becoming a good machinist is knowing how to salvage a screw up.

When I got my last batch of electric etching supplies they threw in an aluminum faced magnet so I could etch whatever my heart desired, promoting a new product line for them.

It will shortly say METRIC and be painted hunters orange. That stuck next to the forward power lever should to the trick. I hope...........

I'll share my next goof whenever it happens. Goof ups teach great lessons and can garner equally great advice from others.

Jeremy

Thank god I use a friends Monarch for Metric threading. Never had this problem.