Boring Head with a Morse Taper 1

I finally got my small, internal threading boring bars.  It took a little bit to ship them from China, but once they got here, I could finish my boring head for my wood lathe.

My father-in-law has started pursuing "ring turning".  There are three styles of "rings" to turn.

First, and hardest, is to turn everything yourself - if you want just a wood ring, you chuck it up, core it out (drill the middle to the right size) and face it, and then chuck it onto a mandrel to turn the outside.  Now, this is the process you'd do for ALL ring turning but what you are left with is something that could be brittle (wood grain on ends could easily snap if you were doing just wood).

The second and third forms use a "core" - it's basically a pre-sized ring that can have a groove in it, or just a flat surface to glue stuff onto for strength.  The second method doesn't require boring.  It has a groove, and you are required to fill the groove in with an inlay material, such as "tru stone" crumbs glued into place with an epoxy filler.  The third method uses either a 2-piece core that has your material sandwiched in between in the groove, or it's just a simple surface you glue your blank onto leaving the sides of your material exposed.  Some examples (this is not a clickable ad) :

If I wanted to explore ring turning with my father-in-law, I was going to have to get a ring chuck and a boring head.  Unfortunately, my wood lathe is 80 years old.  The tailstock is a more taper #1 (or 1MT or MT1 for you abbreviation snobs).  It may not sound like a big deal, but I'd ask you to go looking for a boring head for an MT1 lathe.  If you find one, please tell me - they don't exist.  Also, they don't exist with threads that can easily be mated together.

I had to take a bar of 1 3/4" steel, turn it down to 1 1/2", cut an 18 pitch thread, then bore it out to 0.5505" (the minor diameter of a 5/8-16" thread), and internally thread it.  I wanted it to be extremely tight.  So, when I got close to the MT1 adapter fitting (meaning it kept starting to thread but wouldn't continue), I threw the MT1 adapter into the freezer for a half hour.  Then I hit the part with a torch to get it ti expand, grabbed the MT1 adapter out of the freezer, and threaded it together.  It was still very tight - these two parts are now one - they will NOT come apart.

Then I could thread the 1 1/2"-18 into the back of the boring head.  I used lactate - I didn't get this one tight enough for me to trust it without.

Bingo!  I have a boring head for my MT1 wood lathe now!