Repainting a chinese lathe

Ok i have decided to give my chinese lathe a tidy up so to fix a few little issues .

It may have been asked before on the forum but i have searched and found nothing .

Does anyone know what the hell they use as a filler ? This stuff is the most tenacious crap i have ever seen ! I don't know why they use it as after much hard work and finally resorting to a propane blowtorch to burn the stuff off the casting underneath wasn't too bad , silly thing was they even put it over machined surfaces to hide the tool marks .

There are a few spots that need some attention but it appears as if they have dunked the bed in a vat of whatever they use then sanded it smooth or put it on a rotisserie so it self levels or something . Surely they can see if they improve their casting techniques a little this step and expense could be negated !

I think i may buy shares in the company that makes the stuff as they must be doing a ripper trade !

Ian.

If it's so hard to get off, why not leave it there and paint over it? It must be some good stuff from your description. Probably made from rice flour and epoxy resin.

They used sticky rice ? in the mortar mix in the Great Wall of China held up well.

I got down to a level of paint that paint stripper wouldnt touch it just sort of softened it a little so i though stuff this i will burn it off but even after that the damned paint wouldn't budge so out came the twisted wire wheel on the grinder !

This got through the paint only to reveal the filler which proved even more tenacious and by now there was unfortunately for me no turning back !

What i can't understand is why the topcoat comes off with anything stonger than turps but the shite underneath could survive a nuclear explosion !

And stop laughing i have had a bastard of a day !

Application of cold beer to throat is the only solution then.

Yup and i will even visit the grey goose later on !

Don't just blame Chinese machines, when I was at school in the early 1960s, at the end of the year a number of us got the job in the metal work shop of stripping the paint from the old line shaft driven Harrisons(pre WW1 vintage), on stripping the paint and removing the filler, they looked like Swiss Cheese, it took quite a bit of body filler to get them to a state they could be painted, there were holes right through the head stock on a couple of lathes that you could put your finger through.

Ian S C

That's good to know as my old lathe was a Harison L5 and I have just been offered a very nice Chester Cub 630, same machine as a Warco GH750.

Why remove the filler (except where it is in the way of normal operations, if it is)? Smooth the filler surface an hten repain, you should end up with a much smoother eben surface that way. Thats why the filler was there in the first place.

From my memories of Sentinel, in the late 50s/early 60s, the machine tools were heavily filled, sanded and painted, so China is merely continuing a long tradition in the machine tool industry.

If the undercoat is so hard to remove, why not leave it and apply your top coat over it? (obviously fill any scrapes or dents, and sand back, before final coat)

Howard

I’ve used knifing filler (from a tube) then painted with primer filler from a rattle can on poor surfaces. Halfords should sell both.

Over the 50 or so years until we stripped the old Harrisons they had been painted a number of times, but we did a "propper job", they went to scrap about a year later when the school relocated to another site, I don't know what they were replaced with, it would need to be something substantial, as the school included the Dunedin Polytech.

Ian S C