Frankenstein-ing a Royal Collet Closer for Lathe

[PJ]

Had some time to mess around in the shop and ended up starting down an unintended path.  So over the years, I've accumulated 3 manual Royal collet closer assemblies hoping to get them work on my 11x30 Colchester.  All 3 have issues, damaged/missing parts etc. and only one has the perfect length draw tube for my headstock. So I this week I started mixing and matching good parts onto the best assembly and I think I have a winner.  Three issues left to tackle.
 
1 - The rear adapter needs a .001 opening up to slip onto the rear of the spindle. I have it set up in the lathe indicated and ready to do a light skim.
 
2 - Need to open up the headstock end cover to allow the spindle adapter to fit thru and run without rubbing.  This is a dilemma for me tho.  Pains me to no end butchering stuff even if its for a good cause and especially on near unobtanium items like this original factory cover.  I could probably bore it out nicely on the mill but not sure I want to do it yet.  Project is DOA unless I proceed so we shall see.  Need to sleep on this. 
 
3 - Need to drill holes in the cover to attach the lever arm bracket.  Same issue.  Permanently altering an original cover in beautiful shape.

I'm only considering this because I have the closer assembly and it's nice to have more accessories for the machine.  I don't do much collet work.  Would you guys do the mods if it were your machine??
 
Tried to add photos but it says "upload directory is full."

[chips and more]

I totally understand about putting holes/modifying an original part/machine...I get it! I'm the same way. I also have a collet closer for my Clausing and you know what, have not used it yet, been decades. One reason is too much set-up time. Instead, I use one of those hex collet blocks with a 5C hole in it and put that in my 3 jaw. So far, works for me. And that's when I need a collet job (blue moon). I have a 3 jaw Buck chuck on my lathe that is so nice it's about all I use!

[PJ]

pics

[PJ]

Been trying to post photos but is extremely cumbersome on this forum. 
Is there anything that can be done to allow photo uploads without the runaround, error messages / re-sizing /teeny tiny file size req's???

[TerryWerm]

PJ, in my absence from home and my inattention during my wife's hospitalization, the upload folder has reached its size limit, and I wish to extend my apologies.

I do not have time to totally address this issue this evening, but I should get it resolved over the weekend.

[TerryWerm]

I thought about this a little bit and took care of the issue by expanding the maximum storage space available for attachments.

Been trying to post photos but is extremely cumbersome on this forum. 
Is there anything that can be done to allow photo uploads without the runaround, error messages / re-sizing /teeny tiny file size req's???

Photos appear just fine at the limits that we have in place. One photo can be as large as 6MB. That is not small by any means.

We all need to remember that storage space costs money. To allow larger file sizes would result in our storage space filling up even faster, and in turn requiring that we purchase more storage space.

Who is going to pay for that?

This forum has been free from the outset. There is no advertising. We have asked for donations, but we will not beg for them. Since our humble beginnings, only one person has donated any money toward the cost of operating this forum. Beyond that, all costs have been borne by yours truly. For that reason, it is necessary that we keep file sizes small.

Another option is for people to store their photos elsewhere and then link to them by using the "Insert photo" button rather than attaching directly to a thread. If done that way, there is no size limit.

We now have 1 GB set aside for attachments, including photos. That is a tenfold increase from 100 MB in the past. I need to double check our total server space to see where we are in relation to our limits and figure out just where our various limits should be. If we hit our total server limit, the forum will stop working.

Stay tuned for further developments in a separate thread, we will see what we can do.