Auto feed rethink

Having used the lathe a few times lately I thought I'd revisit the mod I'd done to stop the autofeed, although it worked, the position that it stopped at was a little unpredictable.
What it needed was a spring tensioned lever that snapped fully off when it hit the stop.
Here's the concept I've come up with, not dimensionally accurate but a starter for ten.

Mini Lathe DIY Autofeed stop - Part 2

The bracket finally arrived for the auto-feed stop. A friend at work had it done for me, he uses a firm that uses high pressure water jets to cut aluminium, I gave him a 2D CAD file of the shape and they cut it out of a 20mm thick piece of Aluminium using water!

As is normal, for me at least, there were a couple of things that didn't quite fit, the top of the middle upright clashed with the gear for the cross slide travel so I removed 10mm from the top and then the front edge clashed with the back of the half nuts so I made it 5mm thinner.

Original design with material removed

Bracket Clearance

It was apparent that I wouldn't be able to put a securing bolt through the front of the bracket as there was just no clearance from the leadscrew so I drilled and tapped from the rear, you need to put the spanner through the gap in the bed but it works fine and will be less fiddly to tighten once I shorten the bolt.

Access through the bed to tighten the bolt

So, once I got it fitted to the lathe and tightened up it was time to see if it actually worked.

Side view

Front view

I engaged the auto-feed and it slowly moved along and when the lever hit the bracket it disengaged the auto-feed.

Success, it needs a bit more work and tidying up, I want to shape the lever and line it up a bit better and add a long M6 bolt in the hole in the bracket to give me some fine adjustment.

I'm also thinking about adding a spring and a latch mechanism which will fully disengage the lever when it's tripped as it currently stops the auto feed but doesn't fully reset the lever position.

I hope to test it out later with a thread I want to cut, if everything works out I will have succeeded in adding auto feed stop to the lathe with minimal modifications to the lathe itself.

If anyone wants the 3D model I can make it public on tinkercad.com, just ask in the comments.

Mini Lathe DIY Autofeed stop

Another project for my lathe is a way to stop the auto feed automatically instead of me having to raise the lever myself.
There are a few mod's out there already which address this issue with the mini lathe but they require quite a bit of machining or fabrication of brackets.
I spent some time standing and staring at the lathe trying to come up with some ideas that need the least amount of interference with the lathe and not a lot of machining.

I came up with the idea of adding a second arm to the half nut lever that points downwards when the autofeed is engaged, this would then hit a striker that could be adjusted along the axis of the lathe bed.

The bolt was for testing purposes, I intend to install a shaped lever with a flat surface etc.

The next challenge was to make something that would fit to the lathe and be adjustable and not interfere with the normal use of the lathe.

I thought about a block of wood secured to the control box housing with a length of threaded bar sticking out to hit the lever as it traveled towards the chuck but his meant that I would need 2 or 3 different lengths to cover the range of travel needed.

I considered having something clamped to the lathe bed that would stick out and down to hit the lever but this my get in the way and need to be removed in normal usage.

I settled on a design that would clamp to the underneath of the lathe on one of the longitudinal ribs (can't think what they are actually called !)

Here's some CAD I did whilst working it out. (Done in Tinkercad.com)

Just waiting for the bracket to be made and then we'll see if it works........