A long-shot type thread, but does anyone know of anyone who has a cast iron grooved lapping plate sat about that never does owt and they would not cry to see the back of for a few beer tokens? Best size would be about 16-18" long by about 10-12" wide. Anyone?

had one and it was always full of cyl heads.
It was motor driven as well just stick the head on and check every 20 mins untill dark grey all over. A fecking beatifull job evewry time.

Hope you get what your looking for mate

What job is it for? I use 1/2" thick plate glass for small jobs.

Lapping the mating face of a cylinder head would be the biggest it'd have to do. I've used glass before but found it tended to go out of true too easily. Not tried plate glass though, hmmm.

Try searching for a surface plate, think that is what you need.

What's a "lapping plate" please?

Thanks,

Pat...

at a guess, for polishing stuff flat?

My (possibly flawed) understanding is that a "surface plate" is a flat, inert surface that is used as the baseline for precision engineering measurements. The accuracy of the flatness can be truely extraordinary - down to a few wavelengths of light for some applications.

A "lapping surface" is a similarly flat and hard surface but with fine grooves in it that allow (with the addition of grinding powders) objects to essentially be ground (actually "lapped" ) against it, resulting in a nice flat surface on the object you are lapping.

I guess the usual use for the likes of us would be to ensure very good mating surfaces between things like cylinder heads and blocks.

Cheers
Richard

[Edited on 18/9/05 by SixedUp]

Sixed up your 100 % right in your statement mate.

Cheers.

So basically a posh, very fine and accurate "file".

Pat...

I used to use the front screen from an old telly to lap my BSA cylinder heads on.