I hope I don't need a round part or feature any time soon

 Er, hang on, don't I need two brand-new round parts to fix both gibs?

So I decided to dig into the problem of slop in the cross slide and compound rest of the lathe...

There's... a lot going on here.  I wish there wasn't.
The cross-slide isn't even in this shot, it was over on the plate.

  I'm putting off writing it all up because for one thing, the story isn't finished yet and for another, there's just so much to talk about, by which I mean, there's just so much wrong with the damned thing.  And most of these problems should have been addressed, by me, soon after I brought the thing home.  Had I done so, later work with it would have been much easier because it would be a much stiffer tool.  It's important to keep your tools stiff.

 My excuse is that I got busy and so did the lathe, as I had things to do, and none of those things, preferentially, was tearing my lathe apart and doing fiddly things with it.  This excuse worked for nearly twenty years.  But now, it's really buggin' me, man!

 Note that it's entirely possible to do good, close-tolerance work on a clapped-out 1970s SIEG PoS... _if_ you are patient.

 The timing is perfect since I'm no longer building a railgun laboratory, and my alleged job shop has no customers.

 More as it happens, I guess.  My back is improving but still hurts, so work continues to be slow.