Here is the first part of the carriage assembly, the carriage itself. It rides the bed ways. The steel plate on top of it is the cross slide ways.
And this is the cross slide. I think it and the tail stock are the most interesting looking of all the lathe parts. It slides smoothly on the cross slide ways.
Most of the screws are countersunk and I had no idea how to do that in metal. So I came up with this method of drilling out a "stepped" hole with 3/8" and 1/2" drill bits. The method works very well.
This is the compound swivel base and it has a "pin" that slides into the hole in the cross slide. This allows it to swivel around. The steel plate on top is the compound slide ways.
The compound swivel base is installed and you can see one of the clips that lock it into position once you've rotated it to where you want it.
This is the compound slide, its basically a miniature cross slide. The tool post is attached to the top of this piece. It has a pretty smooth surface with little noticeable draft doesn't it?! That's what new oil bonded sand can do for you! Its hard to tell in the picture but I tried to "mill" part of the surface flat by attempting to bend and grind an old drill bit into a milling cutter and using the drill press as a vertical milling machine! It started to work but I really had no clue how to grind a good cutter so that stopped it from being viable.
Here I'm drilling the entrance for the feedscrew. After I drill it to size I need to "tap" threads into it.
This is the cross slide feedscrew and two homemade setscrew collars.
Ball handles are attached to the feedscrew. The big one will go on the cross slide and the small one is for the compound slide.
Here we have the finished carriage assembly except for the tool post. As I said at the top of the page, I'm considering the apron and lead screw mechanism a separate section. To Part 3; lead screw assembly.