As standard, most of the clamps/stops on the Unimat III are basically an M6 cap screw that you tighten to lock the tail stock, the cross slide etc. to stop them from moving out of position when machining something. Most of them are readily accessible and work as intended but the one on the side of the tail stock was quite fiddle to access and so I hoped that I could improve upon it. It's far from an original idea as I noticed that the late David Smith (DLOS) who posted his various endeavours at improving 7mm locos with his Unimat lathe and mill on various forums had done similar on his on one of his videos for the Guild. The cap screw screws into a substantial steel plate which provides the clamping force to fix the tail stock in place. As luck would have it I had some long M6 cap screws in stock so I cut the head off one, tapped it M6 and turned an aluminium head piece. I got it a bit long initially so had to shorten it to get it to screw on past the body of the tail stock and then I turned a piece of stainless rod that I have had kicking about for years into a small handle. My original plan was to thread both ends and make a an Aluminium knob to fit the end but when I tried a cap screw in the head piece I realised that there wasn't room so I just tapered the rod to make it look a bit more as if it was designed to be like that. a quarter turn locks/unlocks the tail stock so I am well pleased with how it turned out.
I would like to make a similar one to match to replace the other cap screw visible on the top which locks the quill but I don't have any more stainless rod at present. That said it's been good to get back in the workshop to do something.
Egged on by the success of the tailstock locking lever, in the bit of time that I have had at the bench recently I made a similar fitting to replace a second M6 cap screw which locks the quill in place. I having a little more confidence in what I was doing with this one, I made a modification in that I made this one fit down into the clearance hole for the cap screw. The previous one just sits on top. Materials used for both were 16mm aluminium rod and 8mm stainless (I had to buy a length for the second handle but I now have the remains of a metre for other projects) M6 bolts
