Member postings for Bob Stevenson

In my clock club (EFHC) we have a Chinese watch lathe 8mm which was donated in 2019.....a copy of a Bergeron lathe. We equipped it with a Chinese industrial sewing-machine motor.....either from EBay or Banggood..can’t recall which but it is very small, about 1hp, came with switch unit fitted giving forward/reverse & variable speed. & was well under £100

Due to the virus it has not had much use but I did use it once and was impressed....it worked well and I preferred the speed knob much better than the foot controllers on our other watch lathes.

As Hopper has said, this is caused by resonance in the workpiece reacting against the cutting tool. I have noticed that the tension in the chuck, perhaps not surprisingly, plays a large part....if you tighten a 4-jaw holding tghe disc the bands of texture change positions etc.

It's worth mentioning that brass users have a range of workholding methods not usually seen in other trades and areas.....clockmakers often use wax chucks for discs where the disc is held on a flat plate using shelac while surfacd turning. You can do the same thing with superglue and my own faveourite is to surface turn brass discs using a rectangle of clearplastic held in the 4-jaw....first turn aperture fo rdisc then press the disc into this aperture. This method seems to give much less resonance.

Also, I have found that a round-nose tool with flat top gives a much better finish on discs than other types .....keep it very sharp.

@Micheal G.....

well quite!...as have been our attempts to help.

I'm not too sure EXACTLY what you are trying to do......If you can be a bit more specific there are probably people here who can give you specific help......

Are you building a mill from scratch?.........or, are you trying to use the Hauser jig borer?......or, do you have a Hauser MILLING MACHINE?

At Epping Forest Horology Club we have a Boley jig borer which is very similar to the Hauser jig borer in your photos.........It's about 100 years old and has unfortunately lost it's original clever drive system. At some point in it's long life it has been re-equipped with a set of pulleys and what looks like an early washing-machine motor!....it works very well!

There are a whole range of Hauser machjines, some with different drive arrangements.

You might like to email the horologist, author & engineer, J Malcolm Wild who adapted his Hauser mill, the work being described in BHI’s ‘Horological Journal’ about three years back (?). The original machine was driven by a pendant motor suspended above the spindle via a flexible drive.........Malcolm decided that this was way below the engineering of the rest of the machine and developed his own new spindle/drive arrangement

looking at your album pix........that is not a mill but a conventional jig borer.    these usually have a pivoting motor mount working in conjunction with a sliding intermediary pulley arrangement........take a look at ‘Boley’ and ‘Leinen’ borers on Lathes uk....also ‘BCA’

Edited By Bob Stevenson on 15/03/2021 18:10:30

Like Jason I don’t use this method normally..........something often overlooked is the crucial fact that the joint itself MUST be hot enough to melt the solder. If the joint requires more heat than the solder Pailin then you can be in trouble.......by the time the joint is getting to red heat the solder has gone!

I think this item might be worth considerably more than is being suggested here....it has little interest to model engineers but is an important horological lathe which is relatively rare to aquire and quite desirable in certain quarters. At Epping Forest Horology Club we have two similar lathes which are in marginally better appearance....when we were looking at aquiring a third lathe three or four years back we determined that the club would need to spend between £1500 and £3000 to get a machine of similar age and condition....our two lathes are about 40 years old.

The other matters which affect price are the conidtion of the slides and what collets/kit is included...collets are difficult to come by secondhand and expensive. For horologists the 3 jaw chuck is superfluous and has no real value other than resale......The 'arranged' power system is also probably a throw away for serious horological users as they will want to use one of the purpose made Schaublin pulley systems. Another possibility is to sell as components as there is always people looking for parts such as a good bed or tailstock casting etc

I love my little Chinese lathe,...and I loved it's forunner which was a Chinese 'mini-lathe' however, they are NOT precision machines and are nicely 'cheap' for what they are which is very basic and made 'down to a price'.....ie., a price I'm willing to pay without it breaking the bank.

I also have a (old) Colchester Master.........I have never placed paper between the gears of that machine or even thought about it as I always assumed it to be just something that 'amateurs' did! However, the change wheels and banjo of my little Chinese lathe, Warco WM180 are so badly made that the paper strip thing is essential for smooth operation!.....And, as I said; I love it to bits as it does everything that I have asked of it for not much money so what's not to like?

My wm180 is fairly poorly engineered in that the quality of the wheels is poor and the banjo is not acgtually square to the machine so the cogs alway run at a slight angle and are thus very noisy ....unless you carry out the paper strip thing....

What I would say to you Chris, is that if you have never come up against 'Chinese crap' then you have indeed been very lucky so far! The Chinese are a very pragmatic people who will go on making crap for as long as merchants in the west go on buying it,...which they will if people go on buying from said merchants. it's that simple really!

The lathe in the photos looks to be very similar or facsimile to Warco WM180 (which is also "7x12"...although the '210' in name suggests a larger lathe......

WM180 has a printed table both in the users manual and on the front of the machine below the speed indicator window....the table gives both the change wheel tooth pitches and the layiout on the banjo.

In your second photo the banjo is the darker gears on the right of picture.....the banjo is released by means of an allen key at the bottom and then hinges forward for changing the change gears.

If you have a metric lathe the change wheel train is shown in layout and the table gives the gear pitches for wheel at 'A' 'B' 'C' 'D' 'E' & 'F'.......the finest feed or thread pitch is for 0.30mm

If you look at the YouTube channel of 'Ades Workshop' you will find an excellent video of fitting the change wheel train on WM180.....be sure to place a strip of paper between the gears when fitting them to the banjo to get best fit.

Edited By Bob Stevenson on 25/02/2021 18:39:16

Edited By Bob Stevenson on 25/02/2021 18:43:05

Beware comparing ml10 to w180,...they are not really comparable!

I have the W180 and like it a lot, but I’m making clocks & small tools....if I had the space the ml10 is a vastly better machine which is, frankly, in a different league.

It's worth mentioning that clock makers usually keep a jar of brass swarf specially for this job and it has to be prepared by burning off any oil or other contaminants before the first bluing. Also, handy to run a magnet over the swarf too to remove any steel swarf that has become included.

When blueing don't actually bury the parts in the swarf just allow them to rest on the top of the swarf and heat from underneath.

Ron Rose of the South Lon. BHI ( a superb artisan) told me his method which is to use a peice of alluminium sheet with punched holes for screw...a loose fit with only the screw heads above the surface.....then heat from underneath keeping tghe flame moving at all times ....when the right 'blue' appears, tip the screws into the oil.

CNC engraving may not be the best way to do this, either from cost or quality as there are some interesting alternatives used by clock makers. Also, there are dedicated clock face remakers who do only this task.

Simple methods you can do yourself are; ..acid etching using an light sensitive mask frrom a drawing or photocopy of an original........The brass workpiece is prepared and sprayed with light sensitive emulsion from a spray can,......the drawing is photocopied onto a transparent sheet (at your friendly local copy shop)........this transparency is placed over the prepared brass and exposed to sunlight for 5 mins,....the brass is slid into a solution that dissolves the unexposed details........the piece is then placed in the acid and the design etched........finally black compound is used to fill the etch.

An even better modern alternative is to make up your own transparency by photo-copying the design onto special paper which cost about 80p for each A4 sheet then place in warm water and slide off onto the brass (or other) sheet.

The pendulum rod of my first clock is made of coat hanger,...the light grey/silver stuff and looks as good now as it did when first fitted. This would be about 8 or 9 years ago now. At the time coat hanger material was either dark brown/grey or this light coloured stuff. at the time I was told that there was a move over to stainless (the light grey stuff) as it was cleaner for the automated machines that fold up the hangers. I don't know how accurate this info actually is/was, but every time I look at that clock it does look like stainless steel to me......I threaded both ends and it certainly did not thread like a plated rod and both threads still look as new now.

......Hope this helps!

Edited By Bob Stevenson on 11/02/2021 23:07:42

This is caused by there being flex/play in the system and is pretty much normal in most amateur set-ups....you can eventually get rid of it by doing repeated cuts on the same setting until the tool effectively runs out of material to cut. When you return the carriage after the slow feed cut you usually return at faster speed so a thread like outline is imparted to the workpiece.

This 'problem' is much less evident in heavier lathes with nice big castings and plenty of mass...indeed, although rarely mentioned it's one of the main reasons to have a 'pro' lathe. In our club workshop we have a line of S&B 'L' lathes which although small(ish) are made with a massive cast base which weighs in at a quarter ton....not surprisingly they turn 'dead' with very little spring or flex in normal cuts.

This has been a really interesting read with some important issues raised, so I feel inspired to comment....

At the end of last week the TV prog 'Winter Watch' showed Chris Packham and step-daughter with a 3D printed enlarged model of a spoonbill skull and beak. The piece was beautifully formed, presumably to explore the unique dynamics of the spoonbill beak in water when feeding. I sat watching thinkiing that at last here was a 3D item of real value that could have been made by any of the 'shed level' printers, providing of course, that the relelvant programming skills were present.

Personally, I don't see any practical use for being able to print plastic parts because I don't actually need to and anyway, I don't have the programming skills to do so. Were I to knuckle down to learning 'Fusion 360'...something that fills me with dread!, then I would put those skills to using a CNC mill for making my clock parts.....and I would start looking at plasma cutting equipement with much greater interest.

The really important questions here are; do computer controlled machines have a place in an 'artisan workflow' when making one off, or 'bespoke' items. Parts made on a CNC mill are no longer the product of the hand/eye co-ordination of a crafts person.....does this matter?

A few years back while I was helping to run the club stand at the London Model Engineering Ex. I had my first clock on display and we had a visitor who asked what software I had used to make the frames. When I told him that "no computers were harmed during the making of this clock" he became really angry and accused me of deliberate deception! I did'nt know whether to be pleased that he thought my work was good enough to have been made by machine, or upset because he thought hand work might be better!

Yes, but as I recall, the Spaniards werent particularly grateful even as they carted it all away!

The way I get around this is to use a curved slot and a locking screw....not really 'orology', and not really engineering either but it works and you can be reasonably sure it will stay as set.

Being a clockmaker I keep separate tools for brass with zero top rake.......some people say it’s not important, it is for me.

The knurled ring looks like a spindle locking ring....you can see a similar item in the pic of your headstock (with green drive belt) immediately in front of the cone pulley. Alternatively, it might be for holding/locking the tailstock spindle when the sensitive drilling attachment is removed.

The slide item looks to be possibly home adapted from a milling slide....it's not going to be too useful in use and most/many watchmakers lathe compounds have 'T' slots in the top of the slide which aid quick mounting and manipulation of tool holders. Also, slide and mount don't look either parallel or well done to me...if that's a tool holder to far left then you will hae some fun getting sensible use from it in a watchmaking scenario...

Going back to headstock shot;....the placing of the index plate is quite unusual and I can't think of a make of lathe that uses it...perhaps the whole collection is someones 'lash-up' or shed project.

A good source of info about the world of watchmakers lathes is 'The Watchmakers Lathe' by Donald D'Carle...it was first published about 1950 and is still published in about it's 25th edition. it has been steadily updated but even the early copies are a major source of info about these old lathes with most makes listed and drawings of all the bits and pieces.

The black/brass "poles" are parts of the overhead pulley drive,...but the other parts you mention I can't actually see on my screen as there does not seem to be any pix....might just be my screen 'tho! Could we have a look at the "knurled ring with grub screws" and also the "might be a cross slide but might not"

As regards collets for watchmakers lathes, near enough is not good enough unfortunately,....they have to be the exact fit for a particular lathe....a 6mm fit on a Lorch won't usually actually fit a 6mm lathe from another maker even though they look identical to quick comparison.