Member postings for Andrew Byron

thanks for the advice, i had a look at what gears were with the machine and including the ones on it there are 1 x 50T with a damaged tooth, but about half the tooth still there so it works and it on the current gear train. 1 x 60T, 1 x 45T 1 x 35T 2 x 20T 2 x 25T 1 x 40T 1 x 30T and 1 x 35T.

I have also bought two ML7 gears, a 70T and a 50T to replace the damaged one. when i bought the ml7 gears i also bought some suitably sized silver steel rod, what's the best technique for locating the drilled hole in the right place to convert them to fit the ml4?

Edited By Andrew Byron on 24/06/2020 09:26:50

some developments since i last posted,i actually made something. firstly with a view to doing some threading i made a mandrel handle

I've turned down a piece of 20mm bar to fit in the end of the headstock, and drilled it out to take an m8 thread then tapped it m8. i cut the end off at 45 degrees and then drilled the rest of the shaft out with a long 8.5 mm drill.

that took a while, i'm not sure if there's a better way of doing that but i got through it. that's created an expanding end to lock into the mandrel once i've put a length of m8 threaded bar through it, i've also drilled a piece of flat bar to 20mm at one end and welded the shaft into it, and tapped it to m12 at the other end to take the crank handle, which is another opiece oif 20mm turned down to 12mm at the end and threaded with a die, with a suitably sized piece of tube slotted over it which is secured by a turned down washer bolted onto the other end

not exactly precison engineering but it's a start.

i've also been rebuilding a 1980's Mengele forage wagon for a friend, it had picked up a foreign object and the mechanism tha feeds the grass into the knives had tried to eat itself, unsurprisingly you can't get parts for it any more so i've had to make the bits that were bent beyond repair including some new nylon bearings for the feed in fingers:

I've had it running and surprisingly, it works and picks up grass. the nylon or rather oilon comes in a 90mm log, and is really odd stuff to turn down, the workshop looked like someone had been having a silly string fight after i'd finished.

I've acquired some 8mm tooling both inset tooling and HSS, and i bought some new grinding wheels for my old bench grinder so i could sharpen some of the old tooling and blanks that i have around the workshop, or at least try to sharpen them. Which brings me to the next thing i need advice on which os the gear train of the lathe,.

Currently it seems to be geared too quickly for the leadscrew when engaged and the tool is moving too fast along the work and just binds, this is the current gear train but it's not a very clear photo

can anyone advise on what set up i need to get a decent fine feed?

Edited By Andrew Byron on 22/06/2020 23:33:24

Edited By Andrew Byron on 22/06/2020 23:35:58

No worries Jon, i can't promise i'll have everything you want but they did come from a company that re conditioned machine tools so there ought to be some suitable sizes in there, there are some specialist fasteners as well that presumably crop up on certain types of machine tools too, i really ought to go through and catalogue what there is as they may well be of use to other people and it's always nice for this sort of stuff to find a useful home as it were, i don't like to see things wasted.

Sorry, i should have confirmed that my spindle is the later type that is the same as the ML7 but without the register behind the thread, so as Brian originally suggested, it will screw straight on and locate on the vertical register. I was originally going to go with Brian's suggestion on another thread and locktight a collar on and machine in situe but from my understanding of his earlier post the thinking is now that this might not be necessary, if that was the case it would in some ways work out better as the face plate and catch plates that came with the lathe would still thread on as they are without the need to bore them out to fit the modified spindle.

i've threaded the new 4" chuck i got from RDG onto the unmodified spindle and it's certainly a big improvement on the original.

Many thanks to everyone for going into such detail, it's much appreciated,

changing the subject, Jon, did you ever get round to working out which BSW bolts you needed?

I've now got the spindle back together with the new gear in place and it all seems to run ok. i cleaned up the thread with some emery paper on the file as Jon suggested, the thread files have arrived but only go up to 26tpi so were only of ornamental value for this job.

next job is to get the spindle converted as per Brian's suggestion of putting a collar on to take the ML7 fitting chuck that i have to replace the worn out 3" chuck that came with the machine. I've had one abortive attempt to bore a suitable piece of bar out but the chuck is so worn that it's difficult to get it to hold the stock true in order to bore a parallel hole.

thanks for the advice Howard, i was thinking it would be BSW, i'm ahead of the game as i ordered a set of thread files at the same time

**LINK**

this is turning into an a expensive hobby

No worries, i've ordered a thread gauge off ebay, i got a load of old oddball taps and dies in with the job lots i bought from that auction a linked to above, so i could possibly have the right one, failing that i've got some tiny needle files that might be suitable for getting the thread grooves back in line where they're distorted. i had a bit of a play with it last night and i've got the collar going on freely about 2/3 of the way, with a bit of patience i'll get it sorted i think

cheers

andrew

cheers Brian, warm it with the hair dryer, why didn't i think of that?

what thread is on the gear end of the spindle for the locking ring? it needs cleaning up a bit ideally, the ring goes tight on the thread before it gets nipped up.

my very limited knowledge is as follows.

as i understand it, synthetic enamel paints were commonly used for brush painting , they would be used for coachpainting commercial vehicles, or for general metal painting, if you got a tin of bog standard paint to paint say a metal gate, that would be synthetic enamel because such paint is suitable for brush painting. cellulose based paints were more commonly used for automotive re finishing because they were suited to spray application, though on cheap jobs on older cars, synthetic paint might be used to cheapen the job, the paint itself was cheaper, only required one coat and because it went on thicker was more forgiving and required less preparation.

you can paint synthetic paint over cellulose, but not cellulose over synthetic. aluminium needs an etch primer to key the paint onto the metal, once you've applied the etch primer you can put a coat of normal primer over it. synthetic enamel will dry over night but then takes a couple of weeks or more to go fully hard, this means if you paint a car with it, you can't polish the car for weeks afterwards, and if you get a run in the paint you can't do anything to rectify this until the paint is hard enough to flat it out.

you can clean your brushes with cellulose thinner or gun wash if you've used synthetic paint,it will work as a solvent to dissolve the paint and any reaction doesn't matter, dry the brush before you use it again though so as not to contaminate the next job. the reason for doing this is because the basic cellulose thinners will be cheaper than the synthetic thinner, you wouldn't buy a couple of litres of brand specific synthetic thinner then use 90% of it for brush cleaning. Anyone who does a lot of automotive painting will have a drum of low grade cellulose thinners or gun wash to clean equipment after painting and would use it across the boar for cellulose and synthetic paint, if you're just doing a bit of brush painting, some white spirit would be a more cost effective option though.

these days very little commercial painting would be done with cellulose, it's was superseded in the 90's by two pack paints that gave better, harder finishes, but were pretty toxic and not for non professional use, these in turn have been superseded by water based paints.

I've done a bit more at this, i followed brian wood's comprehensive instructions on another thread for dismantling the headstock. all came apart no problem, the gear on the end was only a push fit on the shaft some came off easily, the grub screw thread is still good. the threaded collar on the end was very tight an now i've got it off there is some damage / bruising to the threads.

I've found that the new bull gear is very tight on spindle shaft, and i'm wondering whatis the best thing to do here, the old gear was also abit tighter on the end of the spindle nearer the threaded collar, but it di just about slide down and then run freely when it got to it's correct position, the new gear is slightly tighter though, it seems to be near an interference fit on the shaft and i don't want to force it on obviously.

Hi Jon,

I stripped down the apron on my ML4 and found a similar problem with these halfnut engagement studs, they're 3/16 bsf, i have some 3/16 BSF bolts that have the correct length of thread on them and are the same length as the original studs once you've cut the heads off them, i can stick a couple in the post to you if that would help.

Thanks very much for the input everyone. WRT the lubricators on top of the bearing cases they are two brass pots with push fit tops and a small hole in the bottom, i assumed they were intended to be filled with oil rather than grease, I've not seen anything similar before but they look similar to the ones on this rebuilt lathe

**LINK**

the thread on the apron wheel is 7/16 BSF, i do actually have some BSF nuts having bought this lot at auction last year

**LINK**

I have several lifetime's supply of whitworth and BSF cap screws etc so if anyone ever needs any, let me know. I filed a nut down to half it's original thickness to use as a locknut but with that on as well the gear was too close to the casting of the bed and was binding, but I'll see how i get on with the suggestions here. I was having trouble with the half nuts not engaging as well but I've stripped all that down and cleaned everything and it di manage on pass from right to left before refusing to work at all, taking it apart again one of the pegs that engage the half nuts had sheared off in the brass of the nut, I'd seen a spare on in the box of bits but when i got it out it had suffered a similar fate plus a cack handed attempt to drill out the broken stud. to my surprise i managed to drill out the one that broke on me and re tap it. by luck i had some 3/16 bsf bolts that were just the right length with the heads cut off to make new studs from, they also had longer threads, the original studs only went into the threaded hole half way, which was probably why they were failing. the half nuts seem to be working ok now.

Brian, the gear has indeed arrived, many thanks it's very well made, i will look again at Lukes' thread for the details of stripping the headstock down.

Jon, I'll have a look for the serial number and let you know what it is, i think you're correct that this is one of the later ML4s

I recently bought an old myford ML4 lathe that has stood neglected for a few years. My idea was to get it into decent running condition and learn how to use it with a view to perhaps buying a'better' lathe in the future if i manage to master this one. I've done a fair bit of fabrication and metal work in the past but have never used a lathe before in my life, though i do have an idea of the basic principles.

The first problem i found was when i took of the guard on the bull wheel.

i'm half way to solving that problem as i mentioned it elsewhere and Brian Wood has supplied me with a new bullwheel which has now arrived, all i need to do is fit it, i'll need some guidance on how to do that but i believe there's some info on dismantling the headstock elsewhere on the forum so i'll look that up.

some other probably daft questions, the wheel for moving the apron along the bed doesn't seem to work properly, the lttle cog just threads onto the end of the handle spindle,

so when you turn the wheel it just undoes the nut or tightens it until it binds, is there supposed to be some kind of slim locknut or something?

secondly the tool post, the original clamp is still in the bock of rusty bits that came with the lathe, but it has a more modern square tool post about 47mm square with the bottom of the slot for the toll about 10mm from the base, i bought some cheap import 10mm tooling to get started with and found that in this post even 10mm tools are above the centre height by a couple of mm at least. i wondered if one of the mini lathe quick change tool posts you can get on ebay with adjustment on would solve this issue?

I hope Luke doesn't mind me butting into his thread but I have also recently acquired what i believe to be an old ML4 lathe with a view to fettling it back to usable condition and hopefully learning how to use it. Reading this thread and a couple of other related threads on this forum having found them by googling info on the ML4, i have found the information most useful.

My lathe, to my inexpert eye at least, doesn't look to have excessive wear in it,i think it was used for many years by a model engineer and hobbyist, in more recent times it's been owned by a guy who wasn't really an engineer and was just playing about with it occasionally, so it's neglected a bit but i think basically ok. In all i was quite please with the purchase which was a blind buy on ebay, until that was i took the guard off the bull gear, you can probably guess the next bit.

I've realised that the drawback with these machines is the lack of spare parts, i did manage to purchase an incomplete similar lathe with just the major components on it, head stock, cross slide and tailstock, with a good bull gear on it, for £60 on ebay just before the problems with the covid virus became apparent, however it's quite a way from where i live and i've got no way of getting it back here whist the lockdown is in place.

I'm planning to convert the spindle to take an ML7 backplate as suggested here by Brian Wood, so the information on this thread has been extremely helpful to me

many thanks

andrew