New cross slide for Rose Engine

I recently bought a cross slide from an Axminster milling machine second hand. I want to swap the intended X and Y axis to allow me to have more X axis than intended. This meant that what was now the Y axis had the hand wheel on the wrong end. Unfortunately I could find no way to disassemble the cross slide as I could not remove the fixed nut for the hand wheel screw thread.This meant that I had to drill and tap the alternative end of the cross slide. I bought a pack of T nuts for the table from Amazon and made up a riser plate for my quick change toolpost.

One final problem remained I work in metric and all my cutters are metric cutters and the graduations on the hand wheels were imperial. I resolved this with a cheap DRO from Aliexpress. The one I bought was an LP20E which cost just under £39 including 1 meter of scale https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005006271135973.html.  Two pieces of aluminium angle were mounted to the table and the sensors were mounted on the frame of the cross slide all required drilling and tapping holes in the cast iron which did blunt several drills as the cast iron was particularly hard. I 3D printed a case for the DRO display which is mounted behind the lathe and I extended the power cable for the display and this plugs into the electronics case for the lathe.

I have only done a couple of test cuts so far but it works fine so I am pleased with such a relatively simple modification. The Vevor cross slide that I removed will be used for a future project.