1941 Logan Powerkraft 10" / Montgomery Wards 700 lathe

Thought I'd document my lathe strip & rebuild, as there's not much about these on here.

Got an absolute steal on this beautiful piece of history, it should have gone for twice what I paid!

Unfortunately it's been used in a combined metal & wood shop for a few years, and not protected from the latter work. Needless to say... The crud is strong with this one! Though it was previously owned for decades by a BAE engineer, so I'm confident it's been well cared for most of its life at least.

Fortunately with machines of this era, it'll still be going strong when all the modern Chinese machines have crumbled to dust! After a hearty bit of TLC anyway...

Going with meths for most of the cleaning. Diesel/kero was suggested, but with fuel prices being what they are, may as well suggest Myrrh! Finishing up with lashings of brake cleaner.

For fluids, the manual has suggested SAE 10 (ISO 32) ways oil, so I've opted for that over the more common 68. Now I know MrPete likes oil for the gears, but I'm sticking with the manual and going with graphite grease.

Think that's all for now... I'm further along with the job when I thought to start writing this but this is definitely enough for the first bit!

J.

Edited By UncouthJ on 05/07/2022 20:52:57

Oh it's ok, I've got one too, so I'm allowed!

Two words... BACK GEAR! *Mic drop.

LOL

Beautiful old machine, flat belts and all.

Save yourself a LOT of mess and instead of nasty black graphite grease on the gears, go modern with spray-can clear teflon motorcycle chain lube.

OOOOH! I didn't think of that! Ok, that'll be the go-to for the main gear train, but I'm going to stick with graphite for the QCGB...

Be sure to get the street bike no-mess variety. The dirt bike formula is often black graphite and messy.

I have stripped and am currently rebuilding my 10" Logan 200 lathe, other than the headstock cover it looks almost identical to yours. Very nice machines.

You are probably aware that many of the parts, including manual, are available from Logan Actuator in the US **LINK** unfortunately they are not exactly cheap especially once one adds on shipping to Canada in my case.

For oiling the machine something like ISO 32 would be suitable i.e regular hydraulic oil. ISO 68 is much thicker and should be reserved for the slides and ways.

Clive

Many a good tune played on an old fiddle.

Properly used it can probably outperform a new Asian machine that has been built down to a price. Them bells and whistles may be missing, but possibly the rigidity isn't.

Your Logan looks to be quite a useable bit of kit. Cherish it and you will get lots of pleasure and use out of it

Changing speeds may be less easy than twisting a knob, but you don't have to worry about burning out a control board.

You may have some interesting calculations to do if you want to screwcut metric threads, but probably not impossible.

Some on here produce excellent work on machines that a lot older!

Go for it and enjoy yourself

Howard