A bit of advice. Just because they line up that close together does not mean they line up with the tail stock further out. I would turn as long a shaft as possible between centers and measure the diameter at both ends to make sure it is truly aligned.

Take a small piece of round bar and in a 4 jaw chuck set it up accurately in the chuck. Hold a centre drill to make a conical hole in the bar. Then put a dead centre in the tail stock and slightly loosen up the adjusters. Introduce the dead centre to the hole and when seated slowly tighten up the tail stock. Aligning a point to a point is difficult. A point and a conical hole is self centring and once centred with a bit of pressure will hold the dead centre still for the tailstock tightening.

Nice little tool. We shared this video on our homemade tools forum this week 😎

You don't need the tool. You need to snug up the end bolts and then lightly tap with a rubber mallet to adjust. With a good tight snugging... You can safely slowly tighten them without any shifting to speak of.

Don't know if space would allow but if you did end up switching from magnets to bolts, or even welding it on, you could do one on each side and have super fine tuning! Great work dude!!!

I'm making one for my mini-lathe. Great video

Easier to just buy a mk2(or whatever dimension your tail-stock is) alignment bar, chuck the cylindrical part of it in the head-stock(3-jaw for quick and dirty, in a head-stock collet or collet-chuck for more precise). Hang the tail-stock of the morse-taper end and tighten down(or use Moglice or something similar and permanently fix the tail-stock accurately in place and just use an of-set adjustable tail-stock center for when you need an of center support for turning tapers(which most never will need to do anyway...) Adjustable tail-stock on a lathe is something that very few will ever have a need or use for and those few that do will be using machines quite a bit better and larger than a mini-lathe, mostly they are just a pain in the ass. Buy a large cheap morse taper drill, cut of the flutes then drill and ream(both preferably held in a collet in the head-stock) a hole with it in-situ in the tail-stock that will tightly and accurately fit a ground shaft with a 60deg point turned on one end and a center-drilled recess on the other, drill a oil-hole(facing up, obviously) at the bottom of the reamed hole in that morse taper and put a large bearing ball down the bottom of the reamed hole(small oil-hole roughly centered on where the middle of the bearing-ball will be) before inserting the divot end of the ground shaft, you now have a perfectly aligned rotating tail-stock center that you can make custom tips for(like a large cup for supporting tubing). (if you have some ground and hardened shaft you could make a d-bit reamer from a piece of it and make the hole size as near perfect as you could possibly get with a home-shop machinist level lathe) Needs to be oiled(or grease, I prefer lithium moly grease for this..) every time you use it but access and support wise it is likely to be a great deal better than any other rotating tail-stock center you would buy, and as long as you have the side oil-hole roughly in the same position every time it will be more accurately aligned than anything from the factory or not done with a dial-test indicator and a lot of swearing....

My own solution was a variation of the long bar method. I used two morse taper arbours and turned the ends down to two identical diameters. To align the tailstock I install both arbors, use a dial indicator on the carriage preloaded to zero on the arbor in the headstock, then move the carriage down to the tailstock at the other end of the bed and move it by tiny screw movements until the indicator is also zeroed on the end of the tailstock arbor. This assumes of course that the bed is already levelled to remove twist.

On mine the axis of quill movement droops downward; I know this for checking it with an inexpensive but surprisingly good test bar. If you ream a hole with the reamer in the tailstock and it comes out tapered, that's a sign of that particular issue.

on a hobby lathe like this i would chuck the quil of the tailstock in the chuck and tighten it

turn an inverted cone, push it to the point and that it

Best of luck, I bought two of these. Impressive is the price and how poorly the machining is, but hey they do machine right out of the box. I have spent days working on one, looking real nice putting the precision into them. Cheers!

The reason for the difficulty is the screws have been tightened such that they leave a divot, screws want that divot, even the screw under it, remove the bottom screw you will see the head has compressed the Slot shoulder again another divot. Remove the divot's flatten the bolt faces put a piece of copper in the hole and tighten up copper won't create a divot. Snug slightly and tap into position resetting the clamp handle often. Once there snug up the screws. The bottom screw is the biggest issue a copper washer would do it as the copper won't deform the cast material very little room for a washer, grind off the top of the bolt head some if necessary after adding a washer.

I like your little jig to help with positioning the tailstock. I had no idea the budget lathes had evem further cheaped out on desigm. The biggest problem is your method gets you close but you'll still be turning tapered and inaccurate parts no matter how close you eyeball the alignment. Another video showing users how to use a dial indicator in the headstock to dial in the tailstock would really help move them towards more accurate parts. Lathe bed levelling/alignment is a big factor with these larhes as well, my freinds little lathe had a 0.012" twist in it. This makes it impossible to make accurate parts even with a dialed in tailstock. It's a problem because it requires an expensive precision level but worth knowing about so they know why the parts arent turning out the way they should. Test bars are also relatively cheap for these (under $25) and the easiest way to learn dialing in a tailstock. Using a 3 jaw chuck to do this should also be addressed because of the runout. Knowing why there are still issues will help your viewers atleast understand why. You shoukd atleast be able to turn a piece of barstock 8"-10" long accurate enough to get the same almost the same bearing fit on both sides. As you've done it you'll likely have a interference fit one side and the other will have MANY thousands of an inch clearance. You've made a good start here though!

I would have made the adjuster a permanent fixture, but you also need one on the other side… also, what I have discovered with my lathe, is that the bed is not aligned with the chuck properly… so if I have a shortish bar in the chuck, with no tail stock centre, you would expect the bar to be exactly parallel, but it’s not… the diameter closest to the chuck, has a larger diameter to the other end of the bar… ideally, you need a very long machined round bar in your chuck, with a machined point, to line up with your centre when the tailstock is furthest away from the chuck…

Ever heard of using the cross slide to adjust the tailstock?

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