I’m new to the lathe, as some will know. I have a mystery Frezite cabinet door cutter set for the spindle moulder, where you space the cutters according to the thickness of tenon required.
For some reason, the tenon ends up 0.3mm smaller than the spacers you put in, so to get a 6.3mm tenon, you need 6.6mm spacers (I use 6.5mm). This is not very consistent, I think because the spacers I have are small, so there must be some wobble.
So, what I needed was a shim, OD about 60mm, ID 30mm, T about 6.6mm but may need adjusting. Obviously the faces need to be dead parallel.
I merrily chucked in a slug of 306 (stainless?) that came with the lathe, faced and centred it, and machined the OD and ID. I didn’t forsee the difficulty of getting the thickness exactly right, and being able to finish both flat faces neatly and exactly parallel. The parting tool has left a rough and inconsistent finish on one face, while the other is neat.
Now it’s parted off, how do I hold it to machine the parted face, being only 6.6mm thick? Should I have machined the majority of both faces before parting off?