A couple of years ago I got very interested in restoring my Myford ML7 lathe. These were an incredibly popular English machine which were renowned for their general quality. I bought mine second hand but unused in 1988 from the original purchaser. I have used it a lot and when the paint started to fall off I started to think about restoring it to its former condition.
After watching a few restos on YouTube that dealt mostly with cosmetics I went in search of hand scraping methods to restore the ways back to flat and parallel. I realised I would need some straight edges and a surface plate and while fishing about on Facebook Marketplace I found a guy at the Gold Coast advertising a three foot cast iron straight edge for sale. I messaged him and without ever having met the guy he offered straight off to loan me one for my project!
That was how I met Marcus Christensen of Christensen Machine Works at Burleigh Heads. He runs hand scraping classes for hobbyists who rebuild their own machine tools ... and he has a very impressive following! Over the next few months I would visit Marcus from time to time and one day he invited me to rummage through the room upstairs and in there were the main parts of a HP Laser Interferometer Measurement system. I had seen one of these many years ago in the metrology lab at the QUT where I worked for a couple of years after graduating from Mech Eng in the early 80's. He was happy for me to take it home and fiddle with it and after about six months of research and tinkering (and with some help from Brett Smith of Brett Smith Technologies) I was able to get it to show some sensible results.
Here you will find most of the documents I collected during the rebuild of this amazing system. Some of it was very hard to find!
If you have any questions about the system please drop me a line at iandmacp@bigpond.com and I will help out if I can. If you are rebuilding a similar system please get in touch and let me know how it is going ... Good Luck!