Member postings for Andyf

A digital readout would be good, but ff you don't fancy fitting one you could replace the existing dial with one of much bigger diameter. A 100mm dial would take 150 marks, each representing 0.01mm, and the marks would be just over 2mm apart. With a bit of ingenuity, an O-ring under a bit of compression could be incorporated 'twixt dial and shaft to make the dial zero-able.

Andy

There's some help here, though once the marks have been engraved, I prefer to keep the dial collar on the same mandrel and mount it in a crude (MDF) affair with a number punch-sized slot when whacking the numbers in; my headstock bearings wouldn't like the knocks.

Rather than using the feedscrew dials to get lines of uniform length. I use a crude depth stop on the toolholder, as shown on the bottom third of this page.

Andy

Thanks for the correction, Michael. I've found the thread you mean. That explains why Ketan has changed the name of the documents from "Preparation Guides" to "Dismantling and Reassembly Guides".

Andy

John, asto reliability, cynics say that Seig C3s often don't work that well straight out of the box. They do sometimes need a bit of fettling to get everything working right. If you buy one from Arc Euro Trade, you can pay them to do this preparatory work for you, or if you are reasonably confident, do it yourself; they very sportingly show what is involved here.for the standard C3 and here for the Super version.

As Neil says, the Super version has its advantages. The motor is more powerful and more capable of delivering torque at low speeds, so the High/Low gearbox hidden inside the headstock of the standard version is not needed. The gears in there are made of Delrin, a type of enginering plastic, and have been known to break.

If your budget rules out the Super C3, you might consider the Real Bull (I kid you not!) mini-lathe sold by some UK suppliers under their own names - Warco and Amadeal spring to mind. This is very nearly the same as the standard C3, and indeed most of the parts you might ever want to replace are interchangeable between C3s and Real Bulls. Some say RBs come with a slightly better standard of fit and finish, and they do have various little oil ports to help you lubricate most of the bits which need it. They use an American (KB Electronics) speed control dircuit, rather than a Chinese one, and KB controllers have a better reputation.

Don't forget that buying the lathe is only the beginning of wallet drain. By the time you are finished, you can easily spend half as much again on tooling, though at least most of that can be bought as and when needed, which reduces the pain somewhat.

Andy

As the local council encourages me to put steel and aluminium cans into one of my recycling bins, I put steel and aluminium swarf in there too, along with any offcuts which are really too small to come in useful sometime. I don't put what few chips of brass/bronze/copper I create in there, because being non-magnetic it would probably end up with the aluminium.

Andy

I assume they look like double doors, though maybe not meeting in the middle. Could you fit a peg to the top of each door at the far end from the hinge, open the doors to the required angle, and then slip a Meccano-type strip over the pegs so as to connect the doors together?

Then, viewed from the top, you would have a rigid-ish trapezium, though if the door opening approached 90° it would get more like a rectangle, liable to collapse into a parallelogram in the breeze. To prevent that, put extra pegs at the hinge ends of the door tops, and use two Meccano strips in an X shape (but not fastened together) . Then you would have two triangles, which would be more rigid and permit one door to be open more than the other.

Andy

Well, I can see a green box labelled MEW 201 preview in it, but (apart from an ad in one corner), there's nothing in it except the red cross which IE displays sometimes. Clicking on that and "Show picture" sometimes does the trick, but nothing on this occasion. So I clicked on Properties and followed up its URL but that proved to be a dead link. You can see the URL by hovering on LINK.

Looks like the gremlins are out to get you today, David!

Andys

Edited By Andyf on 28/02/2013 16:45:04

Edited By Katy Purvis on 01/06/2015 12:54:01

I think you may have meant Mod 1 and Mod 1.25, Neil. 1 DP and 1.25 DP might be a bit on the big side.

I'm confused by the dimensions. A Mod 1 gear will have a pitch of 3.1416mm around the pitch circle, and from John's initial measurement of 3mm I thought his ring gear might be Mod 1. But with 88 teeth, a Mod 1 gear has a PCD of 88mm (Mod 1 gears are easy!), whereas he reported a diameter of 110mm. However, his 40mm, 40T gear sounds like Mod 1 again.

Anyway, if he can put the 40T and the 30T inside his ring gear, and the bore of the 30T is in the right place for the motor shaft when all thrre are meshed, it sounds like mission accomplished!

Andy

Well, if you really want to get back to basics, there's a very interesting thread here on casting and building a lathe to the Gingery design. The first post says the author had no experience before he started. First build a furnace.....

Andy

If you can stand the thought of a Delrin nut, there's always this method, using an electric paint-stripping heat gun rather than a tap.

Andy

I'm no paint expert, but the Hammerite might have worn a bit quicker than your floor paint had you used it on the floor and then walked/trod swarf into/dragged things across it.

Andy

Hearsay only:

On other forums, folk have reported good results with floor paint on machinery, for its hard-wearing quality and resistance to oil etc.

Andy

I had trouble with a cross slide (non-Myford) where the dimple at one end of the gib was out of alignment with the adjusting screw, so that end of he gib was beig forced down to foul the slide base (i.e. the saddle). This resulted in the gib strip trying to dig in in one direction, but work more smoothly in the other.

In your case, the problem would be at the far end of the gib, but the grittiness would ease once the cross-slide was overhanging the back of the saddle. However, you say the grittiness is along the full travel of the slide, so it is probably due to some other cause.

Andy

Glad you've found him, Alan.

Just goes to show that you can run, but you can't hide!

Andy

That's great, Lloyd. Turning the spindle by hand takes much of the drama out of a stopping in the right place on a fairly coarse thread where the tool would gallop along under power, particularly when it's a short thread only involving a few turns.

Clean up well; if the faceplate is cast irin, there'll be black dust everywhere, and it's abrasive.

Andy

I don't know the tolerance on the diameter of the old 1/2d, Paul, but on the modern £1 coin it's 0.1mm either side of 22.5mm, so one brand new, unworn £1 might be 0.2mm or 0.008" bigger than the next. That's way outside the precision that Michael was describing in his original post.

£1, £2 and "silver" UK coins wouldn't do anyway, because of their milled edges, which only leaves coppers. I suspect that tolerances on those may be wider, because vending machines, parking meters etc don't take them any more.

Andy

Lloyd, I'm not entirely sure about this, but if your spindle nose thread is 1.125" and 12TPI, and there is a plain register diameter of 1.25" behind the thread, it will be very like a Myford spindle. In that cae, it might be easier either to acquire an old Myford faceplate or a new compatible one like the second item on this page.

Myford threads are 55 degree Whitworth form, and your EXE is probably the same, given its age.

Maybe you could measure up your spindle nose more accurately, and post the outside (major) diameter of your thread, the length of the threaded section, and the diameter and length of your register diameter. I'm sure some of the Myford owners on here would then advise whether a Myford faceplate is likely to fit.

Andy

As Nobby says, you really need to bore it out to the minor diameter of the thread (and dead on the register diameter), rather than trying to screwcut the existing thread deeper and deeper until it fits the spindle. And you need to make sure you don't overrun the thread into your nice new register diameter. If you only have the one lathe, not only do you have the problem of holding the faceplate while doing all this machining, but you can't remove it it and try it on the spindle for fit until all the machining has been done. Apart from trying to do ot by dead reckoning, I think the only way to get it right is to make an exact replica of your spindle nose which you can use to test for fit as you go along.

Andy

I suppose that everyone replying to this thread must like the forum to some extent (software excepted for most folk, I suspect), or they wouldn't have seen the original question. So wholly negative responses are unlikely. But the questions were:

How many people read it ? I think you would need to ask the forum afministrators, who no doubt keep an eye on the hit rate.

Would it be missed if it closed down? I should be sad to see it go, though there are others I would miss more, and I'd soon cheer up.

How vital is it? No forum is vital to me, and I wouldn't go into mourning if any of them died. To be truthful, I do sometimes regret the hours and hours spent at the computer. They could have been devoted to things I enjoy more, or even to chores I dislike.

Andy

I did conclude by saying that I wouldn't bother, for fear of making things worse!

Andy