Member postings for old mart

Sharp tools and slow speeds help, as well as locking the saddle if possible. Make sure all the gibs are adjusted well. Some of the jobs may be better using a mill if you can.

Some of the older types og grease gun have a rod that pulls the plunger back and some have a chain. When the body of the gun is full of grease you hitch the rod or chain into the keyhole slot to hold it there temporarily. The halves of the gun are screwed back together and then you can release the chain or rod and stuff the chain or push the rod back into the gun body. The chain type fit with a bayonette fitting. The spring loaded plunger then keeps the grease pressing lightly on the pump mechanism to stop airlocks developing. At work, we used a couple of AEROSHELL greases, 7 and 22 for lubricating aircraft parts. When a gun was empty we used to ask an apprentice whether he knew how to refill the grease gun. Sensible ones asked how and were shown, the bigheads who thought they knew everything were heading for a messy accident.

The cartridge type are nicer to use and load like a mastic gun.

It's surprising how many people don't know what pitch means. Please measure from the FRONT of the first tooth to the FRONT of the last tooth, no.7. The chuck is likely 130mm. We need the width of the slot in the jaw and the width of the jaw. The number is a serial number and the chuck body should have it also, it has no other significance.

Have you tried spinning the motor without power on, just in case the roughness has a mechanical source rather than electrical one?

Remove the jaws and carefully measure them, including the pitch of the teeth. Also measure the chuck diameter, is it 5" or 125mm? Post the dimensions and keep your fingers crossed.

The only thing I can think against a small jig borer is that they tend to have less table capacity relative to a similar size mill.

Capacity is bore and stroke multiplied by the number of cylinders, no other factors apply.

Firstly, you need to eye up the way to machine the jaws removing the least ammount of metal. They should be clamped in the direction that they will hold the job to take out any slop or backlash. I have dozens of soft jaws, and even when they are close to worn out, there is the possibility of turning the stumps into master base jaws with bolt on tops.

No mention of the actual engine size?

I would also avoid using any tanged cutter sideways, it is looking for trouble. That is why mills use drawbars.

I use er25 collets more often than R8 and have a pair of spanners with extensions to make them about 10" long. The drawbar spanner is about 7" long but as I mentioned, the threads in the tooling and drawbar are free running and lubricated with moly grease. I would tend to tighten R8 collets more than the rest of the tooling though. Having some tightening done with a torque wrench, you will know how tight to go with ordinary spanners, make them the same length as the TR.

Edited By old mart on 09/05/2021 17:25:16

Welcome, Stewart, you will find a wealth of steam engine experts on this forum.

I prefer wire wool and oil, don't expect to make the surface pretty, just mainly rust free.

Some lathes are deliberately tilted one way or the other to aid the drainage of coolant.

Back in the 70's and 80's when I worked at a small firm, we had an ML7 and a Super 7 and the collet system like the thicker one in William's photo fitted both lathes with no bothers. It was much quicker for production jobs.

We are refurbishing an Atlas 12 x 24 which has a bed like a Myford, and we raised it up with a large 40mm aluminium block at the headstock end to give clearance for screw adjustment at the tailstock end. I have a Moore & Wright spirit level, but it may not be sensitive enough. The actual leveling will probably be done by turning test pieces when the lathe is up and running. One of my test bars is about 13" long, which may help. I was thinking of a 20" long bar for the turning tests

Edited By old mart on 07/05/2021 18:58:12

Edited By old mart on 07/05/2021 18:59:49

That is something I have not tried, but if the finish is not great, just cut undersize and finish by boring normally.

First get an R8 to MT2 tanged adaptor. Being able to share drill chucks between machines is a great bonus. At the museum, we have gradually acquired a lot of drill chucks up to 16mm capacity. The smallest is a 1/4" in MT2 but the Cutwel 13mm integral keyless R8 runs best throughout its full range.

I like the drawbar to hold at 2 diameters, 7/8" deep in the tooling, and since the museums Tom Senior R8 spindle does not have the internal pin, all the tooling gets a 7/16 UNF tap run down it, the threads cleaned and lubricated with moly grease. That maximises the drawbar holding power. As well as not holding properly, an undersize tool in an R8 collet will cause the whole thing to close up more than it should and be pulled deeper into the spindle. That risks bottoming out the drawbar as well.

In the last 12 years, we have had three washing machines, a Candy, a Hotpoint and now a Samsung. The drum bearings failed on both of the first two, which had suspiciously identical drums, so I am hoping that the Korean designers have used a better bearing.