Clarkson Tool and Cutter Grinder - Refurbishment - scraping the ways

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Pete, on the homeshopmachinists.net forum website, has scraped the worn ways on a Clarkson Mark 1.

These pictures and text extracts are part of the 'Adventures in Scraping' thread on the HomeShopMachinists.Net forum ... LINK

Thanks to Pete for letting me use his pictures and text.

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Here are the pictures and text from Pete's post in the thread:-

↓ I recently picked up a Clarkson Mk1 tool and cutter grinder which had a very worn slideway. Using a make-shift dovetail measuring gauge I found that the ways were worn 20 thou narrower one end so I set it up in my mill and machined them parallel with a home-made cutter. Whilst this produced a 10x better fit-up than before and took all the slop out of the table it wasn't perfect by a long shot (the reason for my wanting to learn scraping was because of my poor old milling machine needing work). so I decided to set-about scraping this machine to a better standard of fit. Being a tool & cutter grinder I don't have to worry so much about aligning the ways to each other as on a mill so that takes the pressure off me a little.

↓ So here's the first bluing. It shows up a problem with my milling table and probably made worse by the fact that I had to upset the setup and turn it round as it was just to big to get both dovetail sides on one setup.
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↓ Here's the first pass with the scraper. I scraped it rather heavily after seeing this and went over it twice without bluing, as I knew I had to take a good bit off.
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↓ A few more rounds gets me to here, which I think is looking rather good considering what I started with.
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↓ I'm having trouble getting consistent results with my bluing.
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I realise that it's going on heavy and I try to keep a regular film on my surface plate but it seems that it's very difficult to do. What I do is roll out a small lob of micrometer blue on a 6" surface plate with an ink roller then when it looks a nice and even shade right across I roll out a patch on my bigger plate for bluing the part. After one round of scraping I go over again with the roller and do this 3 or 4 times, but then the part starts getting sucked onto the plate and I have to clean it all off and start over again. My tube of micrometer blue is quite old and almost expired so I'm hoping that fresh stuff will produce better results. Could it be the old spotting blue or is it my technique that's lacking?

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