Tapers on Hobby Lathes - How to make them and why!

Dear Quinn: thank you for your scrupulously detailed, unhurried descriptions of how to do things. Sometimes the other utube teachers forget the very front end of that learning curve, which can be very steep. Love your videos, thank you.

I recently spent a whole afternoon chasing acceptable tailstock alignment before discovering that the tailstock was 5 thou too low. I had to drink a tin of beer to get the right shim to correct it :-)

"Turning a taper is so easy there's a good chance your lathe is already doing it without you knowing." -TOT

Quinn, I second the last comment! Your ability to hold the interest of a seasoned machinist yet inspire a newbie, amateur, beginner "like me", makes me feel like "I can do this"! Thanks for all your inspiring videos and articulate explanations so those of us not so experienced can advance. I'm very excited for the episodes I have not yet viewed!

After twelve years working in a machine shop, I went back to school to finish my BS in engineering. While there I worked on multiple projects as club machinist-for-hire. Every afternoon I would go to the shop to start working, and it never failed that someone had messed with the tailstock. Aligning it day after day, I got very good, and very annoyed! They had been demonstrating and practicing the tailstock offset tapers in classes, but not requiring students to realign everything. An essential skill, as you say, a machinist should not be afraid to learn. Thanks for the excellent demos!

A hack method I used was: I had a piece of factory Morse taper tooling that had center holes at both ends. I chucked it between centers and indicated in the compound angle with that. This resulted in piece with about 80% contact when blued up and tested which I was understandably quite pleased with myself for. I'm dyslectic so math and I are not best of friends, so I end up trying anything to avoid too much math.

A long time ago (55 years to be more exact) I was taught to make a taper on a lathe but using a grinding wheel fixed on the compound slide rather that a tool bit. It produced a brilliant surface finish! The use of grinding wheels on lathes does not seem to be popular anymore but I would appreciate a video on this technique if possible using a Dremel rotary tool or a similar device.

Your videos inspire me to push my little hobby lathe and myself- something that can be intimidating as a beginner. Thanks, you are awesome!

This is ridiculously good timing ! A project where I need to make a taper just came up and I had a plan on what I was going to do , but I always learn a lot from your videos and I am certain my project will turn out better now or at least be easier!

One of my first projects was to cut a number 2 for my lathe. I had found a Jacobs chuck with a 3 taper. So with out having Quin to show me how I had to struggle a lot to get it mostly correct. Good thing the taper was the same so I had the angle built in. Stupid method of paper feeler gauge front and back till I was lined up tap tap. Yes I had no test indicator then. If I had seen your method 5 years ago I could have saved 27% of my hair. Thanks for the great instruction. Knowing a better way is always gooder.

One thing that was causing me some grief on my first tapers was the importance of tool center height. You really need to nail it or you'll cut a parabolic curve instead of a straight taper. I chased my own tail a bit with setting the taper up before I realized what was going on. No matter how careful you are setting the taper on the compound you can get a bad blue up with little contact if the surface is curved. Same goes for measuring the initial taper: if the indicator tip isn't exactly on center you will measure a parabolic curve. One workaround for the tool center height issue is to use a tool with a slanted cutting edge that makes an oblique contact with the work. That way you are cutting along an edge and not a point. Usually not desireable but it will save your bacon in this case. Tilt the cutting edge towards the chuck. Thanks for a good breakdown! As usual.

Thanks for a good taper making presentation. There was one thing that You forgot, probably because it is so obvious. When measuring the taper, the vertical position of the measuring instrument point, needle or plunger, must be quite exactly at the centre height. This becomes more important when the workpiece diameter is small. At first thought it seems like this wouldn't matter and actually when measuring to get rid of the taper, it really doesn't. However, when trying to copy or set up the taper by numbers, a misaligned tip will result in a wrong angle since the radius changes. With small tapers like MT1 this can be significant. When copying a taper, the measuring tip doesn't need to be at the centre height. Actually it must be at the same height as the tip of the cutting tool. In practise this will be the centre height though.

Showed you to the Ex wife, she is now kinda interested in my hobby shop. After many years she referred to it as "his machine shop" instead of "he's in that shed as always." Thanks, keep doing what your doing. Your channel and Mr Pete's are my two go to channels.

Excellent!! I am impressed not only by your knowledge but your ability to teach us in such a clear and enjoyable way.

Heartily agree getting over the fear aspect and how easy it really is to do the re-alignment. Two things I learned when doing some MT3 tapers a few years back. First is that making a stub for the eventual tang or threaded draw bar hole on the end gave me more room for the cutting tool when working the small end at the live center. And we need that stub for one of those jobs anyway. Might as well put it in early and make it useful, right? The second thing I picked up was thanks to not having any prussian blue at the time. So instead I put three or four strokes of felt marker on the taper, set it in a socket very lightly and twisted a half turn. This wore off the marker on the high spots and I was able to use a wide lathe file to dress these wider spots down by that last tenth or so. A couple of repeats on this step and I was getting at least SOME marker removal along the whole length. This made for a very easy lock to the socket. One area of error I did pick up is that when using the indicator on the taper it was incredibly important to have the ball end of the stem dead on the center height. Even a small error in this will lead to the taper being off by a bit. But only when using a taper as the sample. For a cylinder like your second offset tailstock method it's not an issue. Hope that helps everyone.

Hey Quinn. I just want to say thank you for putting up these videos. I bought a lathe just like yours but with a mill attached to it because of workshop space half a year ago. I am not totally clueless what I am doing but your videos certainly encourage me to not just go out and buy all the stuff you could have for it. Instead I see a lot of stuff here that is really inspiring. So I will try to make some tapers just after I finish my gear hobbing attachment project. You give me a lot of ideas and you save me not only some money but also a lot of trial and error.

Here I was just pondering making some soft-ish MT2 stubs; someone else had the idea of putting a center drill directly into one to save time tightening a chuck. Thank you for the clear, easy-to-absorb lesson 🙂

Great info. A tip if you ever will use a wedge to remove the taper, turn the end a little smaller, that way the fit wont be destroyed if the edge is deformed by the wedge

It is 25 degrees in my workshop today. Too cold for a hobby machinist. Thank you for a vicarious machining experience.

I think the weak link when testing your tapers is the tailstock. I have the same lathe (PM1030) and the surface finish inside the tailstock could definitely be improved.