Member postings for Shaun Belcher

You have a lathe. Make one. Lock the cross slide in position and set the topslide at 90 degrees to the lathe axis and use it to feed the cut in. A moving steady will probably be required, but is easy enough to make up too.

I take it you are disengaging the tumbler and locking the half-nuts? That's very poor practice. Use the saddle lock if you need to keep it from creeping during facing cuts, though you should be able to face without the saddle moving.

YOu hold the dial with a spanner on the two flats. Then turn the ball handle anti clockwise so it loosens off. Then you hold the feedscrew still and tighten the dial until end float is taken up. Then you screw the ball handle clockwise until it locks the dial in position.

Given your beginner level of mechanical experience, you should hold off from disassembling your lathe any more than is absolutely necessary to get it running. It is not a beginner project to put it back together correctly from scratch.

Yes you can get lengths of feed screw blank. It is an Acme thread. 10 TPI. Diameter, I forget but you can measure that.

If you want to convert to metric, you will need instead to buy lengths of metric trapezoidal threaded bar. Pitch I THINK wouild be 1mm But check that with someone who has a metric Myford lathe. So long since I worked in metric I don't remember.

You might find some metric trapezoidal threaded rod on eBay, Aliexpress etc. Otherwise there are several suppliers in the UK who have been mentioned on the forum before so a bit of searching around past threads should find them. But you will need to be able to use a lathe to turn the ends down and thread them to suit the dials and handles etc.

Another old trick is to cut the threaded section off the feedsrew and turn it around and reattach using a spigot etc so the unworn section of the feedscrew is now in the high-use zone. Probably more effort than it is worth these days.

Oil splatter from these lathes is not a problem. It's normal. That's the way they did things back then. It does not indicate anything wrong with the bearings. OIl will come out of a brand new bearing because there is always clearance between shaft and bearing -- to let oil flow through! A strip of rag tied around the gap between chuck backplate and the headstock bearing will stop most of the "fling". And don't stand in front of the chuck. Work standing in front of the carriage or even a bit further toward the tailstock. Keeps you out of the hot swarf zone somewhat too.

To test the bearings, hold a length of solid bar or pipe in the chuck, about a foot (30cm for you metric types) long. Grip the end of the bar and try to move it up and down and side to side. Measure the amount of movement of the spindle right at the headstock with a dial indicator. Or if you have no dial indicator you might get a rough idea by holding a finger on the spindle and bearing and feeling for movement. Should be about one thou (two or three hundredths of a mm) of movement. IE only just discernible by feel and that's all.

Edited By Hopper on 16/11/2019 10:51:29

Shaun,

To reduce/eliminate the oil fling, apart from reducing drip rate, place a suitable sized O ring on the mandrel end and touching the headstock, oil then only exits on the inside of the bearing.

K

If they are the standard ML7 type dials, the diecast ones with the angled face where the numbers and lines are cast on, they should not be loose. They screw on to the end of the feed screw. This is probably the source of most of your slop.

To adjust, you hold the feedscrew still and screw the dial on using a spanner on the two flats on it. When it snugs up against the slide, you back it off just a fraction so there is a thou or two clearance between dial and slide. Then holding all that still, the crank handle is screwed on against the dial to lock it all into position.

I'd suggest you get a couple of the old books on these lathes that have all this kind of lore in them. LH Sparey's The Amateurs Lathe and Ian Bradleys book on the Myford 7 Series are both still in print and an excellent source of info.

Yes they are a total loss lubrication system. Oil just runs out of the bearings and down into the drip tray below.They are as messy as teh British motorcycles of the same era (1940s).

I try to set my drip lubricators to one drop a minute. Its hard to get them to run that slow though. I only ever fill the glass a quarter full, which is enough to last all day of constant use. Anything left seems to drain out over following days. I use 20/50 engine oil as I find the recommended ISO 32 hydraulic oil is too thin and runs out too quickly. Been using 20/50 on my old Drummond for 50 years or so with no damage done.

A folded newspaper page or two under the lathe headstock helps soak up the oil.

Cross slide screws: A lot of the slop can be the way the end float adjustment is set by the graduated dials and nuts and handles etc. Or by worn brass feedscrew nuts that are replaceable.

I dont know how the dials coould "not work". They have nothing to malfunction. Sounds like they and the retainiung nuts for the handles etc need setting and tightening , which will also remove excess end float.

You could spend the considerable money and fit metric screws and nuts and dials if it suits your needs better. But you will still have an imperial leadscrew, which is no big drama. You can cut metric threads with it without needing anything but the standard gear set by referring to Martin Cleeves' book Screwcutting in the Lathe. There is some small error in the resulting thread, - but so stupidly small that it is irrelevant to normal home workshop use. (Pedants will arrive at the gate with pitchforks and torches in 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 ...)

I actually just looked at the product as shown in the above link. It says it is supplied with two nozzles. That means the nozzles will simply be screwed in place? So it would seem an extension would incur a simple threading operation.

I have no idea of the quality by just looking at the pic, whether good or bad or average. Your latest post, however, seems rather ambivalent - in one part you say you have not yet looked but you then say it looks a decent product.

IF it is not, one can always extend the part by a simple threading or soldering operation?

Shaun, for an oil gun have a look here **LINK** I have two of these and they work very well, not 100% leakproof but very close, i also have the Myford "leakproof" model and mine leaks far worse then the cheapo listed here !

Regarding the bed re-grind by an engine re-builder a pal of mind did that for the surface then sorted the sides of the ways by hand with a bit out of the box thinking and it worked very well.

See your messages Cheers John

Good luck with the rebuild

Yes, and K68 also on the slideways, as said here.

Thor

Edited By Thor on 15/09/2019 05:58:53

Shaun

A couple of years back I was lucky enough to inherit a couple of Valvespout oilers. These have small, on/off controllable, nozzles which will fit into the original Myford "flush ball" type oilers ball apertures and those in he grease nipple types too. The balls are then pushed off of their seats to allow oil in, I have one with H32 and the other with k68 grade oil in, they both easily deliver controlled amounts into all of the oilers on my two Myford 7s and an ML8 . Have a look at one on: www.longs.co.uk/acatalog/Longs_Shopping_Site_Oilers_83htm

Don

Hi Shaun,

Yes it looks like the Reilang that I have. I removed the nipple at the end,mounted it on a mandrel (The thread is M5 or M6 ) and turned it to a slower taper, so that the slightly smaller nose would fit into small ball oilers more easily.

I can only recommend it. It very rarely leaks oil, but can generate enough pressure to force oil through the ball oilers on the saddle of my lathe until it appears under the wipers on the bed.

Howard

Firstly Welcome!

Have not read through all the foregoing, so my comments may already have been covered.

The gears with missing teeth suggest that the machine has been misused (abused was my original word)

Lets hope that it is not to badly worn or damaged to be not worth restoring.

Don't worry about the Japanese chuck. Chucks to fit the 1 1/8 x 12 tpi thread are available from a variety of countries, certainly India and China. the important thing is not where it came from, but how well it and accurately it functions. Assuming that it is a 3 jaw if it holds work concentric within 0.005" it should not be too bad, unless it has been strained and the jaws are belmouthed. If this is the case, the solution is either to regrind, in situ, or to buy a chuck in better condition.

Replacement gears should be available from the RDG Tools who now own the Myford trade mark and supply spares. Home and Workshop Machinery of 144 Maidstone Road, Foots Cray, Sidcup, Kent, DA14 5HS U K may well have second hand gears, as well as other suppliers.

Don't waste money on buying a Myford oil gun. Scatter gun would be a better description; it oiled just about everything, including me, except the parts that I wanted oiled.

Buying a Reilang will be money well spent. They are good, and put the oil where you want it.

For oilers, take a look at the Arc EuroTrade website, for Oil Cups, (although these are Metric thread, not Imperial so may need to have adaptors made. Chicken and egg!) and Drip Feed Oilers which are 1/8 BSP.

There will be other sources to be found on the web, I am sure.

HTH

Howard

Ok, just been out to check what my one has. The spindle has a 65 tooth bull wheel, that's the one with the little dog to engage and disengage it. The other one on the spindle has 30 teeth. The ones on the back gear shaft seem to be the 21 and 56 combination, assuming I counted correctly which is a bit harder with that one. It is a bit oily under there! My ML7 is early fifties vintage.

Is it the one on the spindle that is broken, or the back one? Mine has one tooth missing on the spindle one. I have the spare but have not yet got around to putting it in, and it actually works fine for the odd time I have needed back gear. NDIY is right that you can do a fix in a number of ways that will be quite satisfactory, they are not all that heavily loaded.

The usual cause of broken teeth on these gears is using the back gear to stop the spindle rotating so you can get a stuck chuck off. This is not what you should do!

The 65 tooth gear means that you cannot use a simple detent on the bullgear to do simple dividing, unless all you ever need is either 13 or 5 divisions.

John

If there is only one tooth broken, it needs no more than 3 or 4 grub screws, a drill and tap(s), some loctite (or solder) and a little time spent with a suitable file. They are easily repaired.

That would be just one way to replace a broken tooth.

You can get a new back gear easy enough from RDG, mine was about NZ$60 if I recall correctly. Change wheels are not a problem until you want to cut threads, so long as you have enough to give you a useful fine feed. The price sounds pretty good considering the prices sometimes asked for Myfords here in NZ, even if you do have to do a bit of work. Don't rush into doing any major work. until you have had a bit of a play with it.

So whereabouts in NZ are you? I'm in Cambridge (NZ) myself.

John