my shrinking aptitude

 I had a six inch long boring bar, and I wanted it to be ten to twelve inches long.

"that's what he s-cough wheeze, nothing, nothing, I didn't say anything"

 And that's on-accounta-becuz I need to reach into my spindle about five inches, and there needs to be sufficient length to also fit into a tool holder.

 Instead of saving my pennies and spending $50 or so on The Real Thing™, I decided the thing to do would be to bore a hole in the end of an extension, whittle down the end of the existing bar to just a teensy bit too big to fit the hole, then heat-shrink them together.

 An attempt was made...

 Post-failure investigation revealed that the hole is tapered, not cylindrical.  Not by very much, but when doing shrink-fits on small diameter parts, small dimensional changes matter. 

 Why did that happen?  Because the previous owners over-tightened the bolts and broke out the casting (of the cross slide). Although I'd snugged up the t-bolts as much as I'd dared with the compound at exactly zero, it came loose and gave me a one degree taper in the hole.

 I've been planning to fix that casting for years, although it would be scary new territory for me, I at least have the theoretical ability, now that I own a rotary table for the mill.

 Perhaps I should not be too hard on the former owners because the casting is kinda sh!te and is definitely too thin; around a tenth of an inch or less in that circle-track. 

 Yanno, back in the day, South Bend used to provide their own, shorter-than-normal square head wrenches for various bolts on their machines, and now I wonder if it was to prevernt overtightening.  The castings of the wrenches had a thin, uncomfortable edge too.  Makes ya wonder.

The usual methods to fix this sort of thing are to fill in the missing chunks with either brazing or welding with a high-nickel cast iron repair rod/wire, then re-maching the round bearing surface and the t-slot circle.

 Both methods require completely degreasing and pre-heating the whole slide up to high temperatures.

Alas and alack, my welding tanks are too low to use and for now, I can't afford to swap out the tanks or even return them, so projects like that just aren't happening.

Grumblecakes:

Will ya look at what those ham-handed buffoons did?
All they were making was pool cues!  WTH?