The power feed uniformly feeds the carriage horizontally for a consistent finish, unlike doing it by hand. It's not adequate for threading, though.

This used to be a rack-and-pinion drive, but now it's a worm drive.

Another upgrade was to add bearings to the steady rest for smoother support of long stock. This is the original.

Each finger needed a flat section for its bearing.

Drilling the pilot hole for the bearing screw.

Drilling the actual hole, which is guided by the pilot hole.

And the final result. The fingers can be adjusted to ride along the workpiece.

Here's an example. This workpiece it too long to support by the tailstock, so the steady rest does the job.

And finally some accessories, either purchased or fabricated. A nice thing about machine tools is that they can be used to produce ... more machine tools. Everything was laid out for disassembly and cleaning.