Need advice on rehabbing old stuffing box/shaft seal

Hi guys,

So I'm working on salvaging the overhead drive transmission from an old Ames instrument lathe. (details in different thread, just search "B.C. Ames".)

It turns out to have shaft seals made out of what looks like 3/16" jute twine. Some were just wrapped around the shaft of a control lever, fitted into a counterbore in the case casting. The rotating input and output shafts had stuffing boxes, stuffed with the same stuff. The only problem is that they were pretty clearly leaking before the unit was retired: the boxes are jammed down to maximum adjustment, and the shafts underneath have been scored. About .020" deep, by eye. (Pix attached.)

My questions are these:
(A) what modern material would you replace the twine with?

(B) what to do about the scored shafts? I could just knock everything off the current shafts, and replace them, but some of the transmission components are pinned in place, and I really don't want to measure out and re-drill all those holes if I can avoid it. They had a thing for tapered dowel pins, and I'm morbidly certain that these are 'reamed in place' tapered seats. Really don't want to fuss with those if I can avoid it.

Part of me thinks that the stuffing box might just adjust itself to deal with the scored shaft. The rest of me thinks the first half is way too optimistic.
Opinions? Experience? Wild Ass Guesses?

Don't know what the final output RPM is likely to be, but let's assume 1800 for now. Input probably 2K.

Regards,
Brian

Its Gland Packing and works very well but needs replacing more often than 60 years... your local bearing supplies can help you with that

Those stuffed boxes as you call them do they offer adjustment?
Ie when the gland packing leaks you can compress them to seal again.

Maybe those nuts are a bees dick eccentric and foul the shaft or contaminates were blown into the packing with compressed air cant say for sure from your photos

new_guy said:

Its Gland Packing and works very well but needs replacing more often than 60 years... your local bearing supplies can help you with that

Those stuffed boxes as you call them do they offer adjustment?
Ie when the gland packing leaks you can compress them to seal again.

Maybe those nuts are a bees dick eccentric and foul the shaft or contaminates were blown into the packing with compressed air cant say for sure from your photos

Click to expand...

Yes, they do adjust down to increase the pressure on the packing material. The scoring is likely due to 84 years of high crap/low maintenance environments.
Can't say for sure when the unit went out of service, but it was a pretty high hour unit before it got mothballed. I doubt it's ever been changed, or even messed with, beyond cranking the gland nuts tighter as it leaked.

Regards,
Brian

Ok yeah sounds about right then the scoring doesn't mater it will still seal just take the care on installing and common sense

KLINGER Australia : Compression Packings & Gaskets

Alberic:

You do not say what diameter the shaft is and what diameter the bore of the "stuffing box" (the place the packing is held) is. Normally, for square braided packing of the sort that the Klinger site shows, the difference in these two diameters, divided by two, will give the approximate size of square braided packing. I believe the smallest size of square braided packing may be 1/4".

Packing is sold by the pound, as well as spec'd by the nominal size. Most people are going to use the packing to repack a variety of valve stems and/or pump shafts, so they buy a spool of it. You only need a small amount.

You may also be dealing with a fairly small space in which the packing will go. For this reason, I am going to suggest trying some loose valve stem packing.
This is more like a loosely braided rope, and is used for repacking valve stems and small pump shafts. Plumbing supplies (REAL Plumbing supply houses, not Lowe's or Home Depot, but plumbing supply houses which deal with commercial jobs and steam heating contractors) will have it. Years ago, it was a "graphited asbestos yarn", or a "graphited jute yarn" used to repack smaller stuffing boxes. A small spool is all you need of it.

Do NOT get talked into using any kind of Teflon containing packing material. The stuff is bad news. Teflon packing will heat up and score a shaft in record time. It is billed as being a "no drip" packing for pumps and valves, and billed as being self lubricating. I've had to much bad experience with it repacking shafts on hydro turbines and pumps after we got told to stop using asbestos-containing packing.On a small drive shaft such as you are dealing with, the Teflon based packing would have to made up tightly to compress enough to fill the scored groove in the shaft. Made up that tight, it would bind on the shaft, overheat, and score the shaft more deeply.

A soft packing such as graphited jute fiber will work fine. I've seen plenty of pump shafts and even big hydro turbine shafts that had wicked looking scoring from dried-up packing made up too tight. With removal of all the old packing and re-packing properly, the new packing did the job. Packing will conform to the groove scored in the shaft. That's its job.

A commercial plumbing supply house should have a plain "yarn" type of valve packing. Not Oakum (used for packing bell and spigot joints on cast-iron soil pipe), but "valve stem" or "faucet" packing. As I said, do not settle for a roll of the Teflon based products. There is one valve packing out there which is a round white "cord" of some kind of Teflon packing, about 1/16" or 1/8" in diameter that is in common use. NFG for your application.

First step is to remove all the packing in the stuffing box on the gearcase. NO old packing should remain. Then, if you are using the braided yarn type of packing, you cut a small amount from the spool and twist it in your fingers to make a tighter strand which will fit into the stuffing box. Wrap the yarn around the shaft outside the stuffing box and lightly score it with a sharp knife or single edge razor blade (not not cut so the shaft is contacted by the blade). The scoring of the packing should be such that it forms a ring around the shaft with no angularity (do not wrap a run of packing around the shaft and cut it across several rings). Each ring should close when placed squarely on the shaft.

Stack the rings in the stuffing box. Use a blunt piece of bronze brazing rod or some wood whittled to size for this. Using screwdrivers or scribers or similar can raise burrs on the shaft which will cut the packing and it will never seal in service. Place each ring in the stuffing box so the butt end joints are staggered.
After a few rings are in place, make up the packing gland and compress the packing lightly. This make room for another ring or two.

I'd put a little grease on the shaft before packing the stuffing box. When you have packed the stuffing box, tighten the gland only enough to compress the packing slightly. Make sure you can turn the shaft by hand. Surprisingly, some people tighten packing glands on this type of seal after repacking so much that they bind the shafting, and I've seen some new packing smoke on the first running. Just tighten the gland nut lightly. Fill the gearbox and start the drive running.

The packing may drip some oil, which is OK at first. Tighten the packing a little bit and keep the drive running. Feel the stuffing box with your fingers or shoot it with a temperature sensing gun, and make sure it is not getting hot. A little warmth is OK, but if seems to be getting hot quickly, stop the drive, back off the gland nut and let the packing "come back". Retighten the gland nut lightly and try again. Tighten the gland nut only enough to stop any oil dripping out along the shaft. A little "fillet" of oil around the shaft at the mouth of the gland is fine, this means the oil is getting in to lube the packing.

Packing a stuffing box is an oldtime skill that stationary and marine engineers, millwrights, and garage mechanics as well as homeowners (in the days of packed faucets and cars with water pump packings) all had. My late father never said "slip joint pliers" or "Channelocks". He always refered to that kind of pliers as a "water pump pliers", as that was what was used many years ago for adjusting the packing glands on old car water pumps.

On water pumps, hydro turbines and ship's tailshafts, this type packing was usually adjusted to give a slight drip out the packing gland along the shaft. That kept the packing running cool and lubricated. A braided jute fiber packing with tallow was used on water pumps and similar. A small spool of packing for steam radiator valves (if it is a replacement for the old braided graphited asbestos yarn) will work for you. Another type of packing to avoid is "Grafoil" or similar. These packing are "moldable" graphite containing material. Billed as "zero drip packings" and similar. It will not work in your application and will chew up the shaft further as well as smoking if you get it tight enough not to leak oil past the scoring on the shaft.

You may also find the braided "yarn" type of steam valve packing from vendors selling supplies for people restoring and running old engines (hit n miss, steam engines, and similar).

I would take a strip of abrasive cloth and polish that scored area in the first pic lightly. The scores won't hurt but burrs and roughness will. I like to lightly grease the packing, makes it easier to install and gives a bit of lube at it wears or "takes a set" on start up.

Joe Michaels said:

Alberic:

You do not say what diameter the shaft is and what diameter the bore of the "stuffing box" (the place the packing is held) is. Normally, for square braided packing of the sort that the Klinger site shows, the difference in these two diameters, divided by two, will give the approximate size of square braided packing. I believe the smallest size of square braided packing may be 1/4".

<much good stuff snipped>

Click to expand...

Outstanding! Many thanks.

One question: you talk about scoring the packing. So the idea is to make up a bunch of small rings that sit on the shaft, rather than a coil like a spring?


Now I'm off to get the case soda blasted, and then see about finding stuffing and maybe new bearings. Wheeeeee.....

Thanks,
Brian

Geo. Wilson has the packing, and Joe pretty much answered all of your questions.

Lee (the saw guy)

Brian --

The way I learned to fit "cord" packing is to wrap the cord-stock around a wooden rod the diameter of the shaft being packed -- what you termed "like a spring" -- and then cut the stock into split-rings by drawing a knife down the length of the coil. The rings are dipped into a lube oil containing powdered graphite, and installed into the packing box, one at a time, being sure that the cut ends of the ring butt together, without significant overlapping.

Next, the ring is tamped into place with a soft punch (wood, plastic, or soft metal) sized to fit between the shaft and the wall of the packing box. Successive packing rings are positioned so that their splits are half-way around the shaft from each other.

The final ring (or sometimes final two rings) doesn't actually fit into the packing box, but is simply wrapped around the shaft so that it ends up inside the packing nut / bonnet when the job is done.

For whatever its worth, an old-timer I knew made his own water-pump packing cord from braided cotton clothesline, which he washed thoroughly to get the fillers out, dried, and then thoroughly greased with automotive chassis grease (which was thickened with a calcium soap, and therefore very water-resistant) mixed with powdered graphite and powdered mica. Shafts that wouldn't come into contact with water were packed with rings cut from old felt hats.

John

Joe's write up covers the bases very well. Re-packing glands, stuffing boxes and the like is a frequent, routine task for the engines in our mill engine museum. We have hundreds of them from little ones up to largish for piston rods etc.

Fitting is fairly straight forward, but getting the old packings out can be tricky. They can get packed down and cooked so they won't easily come out. They can be inches down a tight bore, making it more difficult still. We are lucky - we have some of the original tools for this job - basically a strong corkscrew on the end of a long spring shaft with a tommy bar to turn them with. This allows you dig the old packing out without too much struggle.

Billmac summed up the methods of removing "petrified packing". A standard set of tools for powerplant, ship's engine room, or work on maintaining pumps and valves in any sort of installation with "soft packings" is a set of "packing extractors". As Billmac described, these are usually made in matched pairs and are basically corkscrews attached to lengths of "speedometer cable" with tee handles. If the stuffing box is large enough, these corkscrews are started into the old packing much like any corkscrew starts in a cork. Get a good few turns of corkscrew into the packing, then get the other packing puller in diametrally opposite, and try to pull the packing out. We used to make all kinds of hooks out of sharpened and bent welding rod when the corkscrews could not budge the petrified packing but pulled out chunks of it. We used to joke about either being OBGYN doctors or dentists when the old packings were obstinate and petrified.

The real problem is when some unknown previous "mechanic" decided to "repack" or "fix" a leaking packing gland. These jokers would tighten the gland until it they could get no more on it, and if something did not strip or break, they then backed the gland out, and wadded in a ring or two or three of new packing. Being the high class "mechanics" that this type was, they would usually wrap the new packing in a spiral around the rod, shaft, or valve stem, and then cut the ends off. This left a coil of packing spiraled around the rod, so they would take screw drivers, drive punches and anything else that fit and beat the snot out of the new packing until they could get the gland to where the threads caught.

On one job, the people assigned to repack some hydraulic "servomotor" cylinders on a hydro turbine did just that. They kept putting in rings of packing and tightening the gland down as hard as they could. When they went to stroke the wicket gates on that unit as part of the "setup" before returning to service, the tight packings had stalled the hydraulic servomotors. The answer was the old style packing rings leaked a drip of oil, and oil leakage of any sort was now forbidden. eventually, the whole old hydraulic servomotor system was replaced with something running at higher pressure, having smaller cylinders and modern mechanical seals. I suppose that was one way to cure leakage at packings.

All too often, I'd hear: "We tried repacking the ----, but the new packing leaked...." The reality was they tightened the snot out of the gland until they dried things up. Or, they'd put on the maintenance record that "wrong packing ordered", or "could not stop leakage, further repair required..." So, I'd get a call, and go take a look, and ask for the mechanics to disassemble the packing gland and pull out ALL the packing. A good repacking with removal of ALL the old packing and properly cut rings usually did the trick. Seen a lot of packings on shafts, rods, and valve stems in my career. Heard a lot of good song-and-dance routine from packing salesmen as to how the new super duper packing would solve all problems with worn shafts, runout in the shafts, and everything else. Of course, the majority of the packing salesmen who'd show up at the powerplant were often anything but former mechanics or engineers. Schoolteachers who'd been chased out of high school classrooms by hoodlums for students, ex-junk bond peddlers, and guys who were simply lifelong salesmen of anything. It was rare to run into a packing salesmen who had been a marine engineer or powerplant mechanic or some similar profession that might have given him some firsthand experience and insight. The salesmen were only as good as the blitz courses the packing makers gave them. I lost count of how many of these new "wonder" or "super duper" packings made from Grafoil, PTFE, and similar we tried on hydro turbine and pump shafts, and how many of those packings were not worth the powder to blow them to hell. We had salesmen invariable claiming they could furnish drip tight, no-maintenance packings and offering to provide packing at no cost if we'd try it. Of course when the stuff failed in service, we were told it was our fault for how we put it in, or conditions beyond when the manufacturer recommended. We went back to basic packings made of braided jute fiber with tallow, or jute fiber and graphite or graphited braided Aramid. We adjusted the packings to drip a little and things ran just fine for 24/7 for months on end.

We've made packing pullers when we had none handy. Got corkscrews at the housewares department in a store, got a speedometer cable, and made some sleeve couplings. Brazed things together and brazed on some flat bar tee handles and we had a set of packing pullers. Mostly, we used "picks" made from bent welding rod sharpened to a point to hook the packing out in chunks.

On the steam engines and steam pump at Hanford Mills, I provided a "Spam" can and brush with some flake graphite and steam cylinder oil. When the steam engines and steam pump are running, whoever is on watch swabs the piston and valve rods with steam cylinder oil and graphite. It helps lube the packing glands. Whether this is really necessary or not, I do not know. I just know when I was on the Great Lakes, the engineers on vessels with recip engines would have their oilers swab the rods with graphite and steam cylinder oil. The oilers had brushes on long handles to reach the piston and valve rods without getting themselves into the moving machinery. With saturated steam, I suppose the steam quality is a little on the wet side, so the rods probably would do fine without being swabbed. But, a little lubrication never hurt.

Hi guys,

Joe, many thanks for the thoughtful replies.

I just got stuffing box 2 of 2 dismounted, and cleared. That one looked like it'd been stuffed with awning thread instead of jute twine. Shaft under said stuffing box also heavily scored.

Next step is blast the casing, clean all the parts, and start thinking about putting it all back together. The bearings may be OK.

The stuffing boxes are only about 1" deep, with a 30 degree internal taper on both sides. They screw apart. Was pretty simple to get the stuffing out, thankfully. No corkscrews required.

My plan in repacking them is to run down some modern valve packing, saturated with graphite. One of the local guys appears to have it.
Then wind a coil of it onto a dowel the same OD as the shafts (roughly .500" ) and then cut the coil into rings. Pack however many rings onto the shaft as will fit with the stuffing box cover just barely threaded on. (making sure to keep the seams out of line with each other.)

This leaves me with a question: so if I use 1/4 or 3/16" packing, I'm going to have a pretty big hole in the stuffing box. It's much wider than would be taken up by a 1/4" string. (for a .500" shaft, the stuffing box is about .875" max ID, with a 30d. internal taper.) I haven't miked it, so those are ballpark figures.)

So how to handle the extra space between the OD of packing layer 1, and the ID of the stuffing box? A coil of more stuffing over the top of layer 1?

As I said, I'm planning on setting it up so it works with the compression covers as close to 'full out' as I can, to give myself as much tightening room as possible. At least in theory, these seals were *supposed* to be drip-free as originally constructed. (The Ames sales literature for this unit made a big point of it. But we all know that song...)

One of the local machine dealers has some pre-bent Ti sheet in roughly the right size to make a splashguard. I'm sort of liking the idea of a bronze gearbox, 7 feet up in the air, with the leather belts, covered by a peacock blue titanium splashguard. (If you're going to steampunk it, *steampunk* it...) My wife is reasonably understanding about my tools, but oil sprayed all over the ceiling/wall/rest of room would be pushing it much further than I'd want to in a house with this many sharp pointy things.

Next question: oil.

I originally thought there were bulkheads between the open race ball bearings, and the oil chamber, so the oil could be gear oil, and the bearings could stay greased, and neither would contaminate the other. No such luck, it just looked that way. Which means that the oil needs to keep the bearings happy too.
Any suggestions? (The bearings are about 1" OD, and the balls are .250"-ish.) My original thought was 90wt gear oil. But some of the older gear (like Model-T transmissions) ran on 140wt. (Which I have on the shelf, god help me.)

Any thoughts or opinions?

Regards,
Brian

Alberic said:

Hi guys,

Next question: oil.

I originally thought there were bulkheads between the open race ball bearings, and the oil chamber, so the oil could be gear oil, and the bearings could stay greased, and neither would contaminate the other. No such luck, it just looked that way. Which means that the oil needs to keep the bearings happy too.
Any suggestions? (The bearings are about 1" OD, and the balls are .250"-ish.) My original thought was 90wt gear oil. But some of the older gear (like Model-T transmissions) ran on 140wt. (Which I have on the shelf, god help me.)

Any thoughts or opinions?

Regards,
Brian

Click to expand...

If the gearbox has a drain plug low down on the side or no drain plug at all then likely it was intended to use grease. The 10 weight oil in the grease is what makes the anti friction bearings happy, the rest is slung out until everything cools down & gets back together.

Matt

Alberic:

I am glad you got something out of my posts. I do tend to go long and reminisce over past events around machinery and the people who worked on it.

The awning twine used by the previous owner may well have contained nylon fibers or something similar, which would be quite abrasive to the shaft.

You mention the shaft is about 0.500" diameter and the stuffing box is 0.875" ID, which leaves a 3/16" gap on either side of the shaft to be filled with the packing. The answer here is two-fold: if you were repacking a LOT of these stuffing boxes, you'd order a spool of 3/16" square braid packing. For one or two stuffing boxes, this does not pay to do. My suggestion here is to take some of the valve packing and twist it into a cord or rope a bit larger than 3/16" diameter. Once you have done that, use a beer bottle, hardwood dowel, or anything similar as a rolling pin. Roll the packing out on a hard flat surface so you get the packing into a rectangular cross section, about 3/16" on the lesser dimension. Cut your rings from that. We used to do this with odd-sized stuffing box/shaft diameters, using a wood rolling pin we'd bought at the housewares counter of the local hardware store (the mechanic who made the purchase was a long time getting over the kidding about his old lady needing it to clout him with, and similar).

As for lube leaking out of the gearboxes: We had a situation with some Limitorque valve operating gear boxes. These were originally spec'd to use an automotive type of grease. The grease channelled around the gears and things ran dry. We then were advised by the representative to us Mobilux EP 023. This is a "semi fluid" gear lube for gearboxes which have damaged seals or no seals. On our railroad, we have a few gearboxes on the smaller locomotives which never had anything more than a dust seal. These slung regular gear oil out the shaft openings and all over the tracks. We filled them with EP 023 (you have to talk to it and coax it out of the pails), and the stuff did the trick. Last week, we had a problem with a Dodge gearbox on a piece of track maintenance machinery, output shaft seal was shot and it was slinging oil all over. Rather than take a piece of maintenance of way machinery out of service and have a big job (this being the season for track work), I told the mechanics to get some EP 023. They reported it dried things up with that gearbox as well.

I would try to get a gallon of EP 023. We buy it by the 5 gallon pail, which is more than a lifetime supply for your needs.EP 023 is just fluid enough to sling around in gearboxes to lube the bearings, and will not channel. On the other hand, it is thick enough not to run out of small openings to any great extent. An oldtime trick was to get heavy steam cylinder oil and run that in gearboxes. To this day, even though the uses for steam cylinder oil are so small as to not even be a blip on the oil and lube manufacturers' screens, steam cylinder oils are still made. One use, which probably is far greater than for steam cylinder lubrication, is to fill worm drive gearboxes. Some gear drive makers will still specify a 600 weight compounded steam cylinder oil. If there are bronze parts in some worm drives, the modern extreme pressure additives in gear lube may attack the bronze, so the steam cylinder oil is spec'd. If you can get a quart or two of heavy steam cylinder oil, this may work as well for you. And, steam cylinder oil, when it gets warmed up, has the nicest aroma. Steam cylinder oils are "compounded" from a form of canola (previously known as rapeseed), tallow, and mineral oil stocks. They have excellent film strength. A quart of two of the heavy steam cylinder oil may work handily for you.

Do a good repacking job, get the heaviest gear lube you can find (140 weight), and see how things behave after that.

There are limits to how much scoring can be accommodated by packings. This is a big issue for our museum, because most of our engines had a long - very long, very hard life. Piston rods and valve rods start with a little scoring, but this gets worse over time and steam cuts the shafts as well. Note that these are packings over shafts that have longitudinal motion, not rotation. Eventually the diameter in the packing area is reduced to the extent that no packing can compensate. When that happens, the best repair is to make an entirely new shaft. This is not so difficult for a small engine - just needs careful turning to match the old shaft. But,, mill engines get very big and you need a significant sized lathe to make a new piston rod for one of these. In the past we have replaced sections of such shafts - a much more difficult repair, but feasible with the tools available to us.

Sometimes academic curators say that such repairs should not be made to historic engines. We disagree, because for us it is more important that our engines run on steam as they were designed. We also take the view that most mill engines had repairs such as this (or far more radical) over their lifetimes.

billmac:

I agree with your analysis of reciprocating rods vs rotating shafts and how much wear or scoring a packing can take up. On the big hydro turbine shafts, it was nothing to see grooving or "necking" 3/8" or 1/2" deep on a side, but this was on rotating shafts. The packings on a hydro turbine had three or four rings of packing, then a lantern ring, and another three of or four rings of packing. Pressurized water was piped into the stuffing boxes and came into the space around the shaft at the lantern ring. This was to keep the packing lubricated, and hopefully, to flush clear water thru both ends of the stuffing boxes. The river water in those hydro plants contained varying amounts of silt, which was quite abrasive.

I've seen some old steam engine valve and piston rods worn down considerably from original diameter. The interesting thing was the wear was fairly uniform, and in just the area of the rods which passed thru the stuffing boxes. There was not much that could be done, and new packings would help a bit, but steam blew out of the glands even if the packing gland was set up on. I can sympathize with your dilemma when confronted with museum curators who want to keep everything as it was, nothing changed. The curators or preservationists who take things to extremes can prevent otherwise viable projects from coming to fruition. We saw that at Hanford Mills, where the original side crank steam engine had been removed in about 1920. No one could find a side crank engine of similar size and "hand", and plenty of searching was done. Having a replica engine built was even explored but was too costly. The result was a good re-creation of the original boiler plant was built and operational and only able to furnish steam to one small upright engine. Eventually, the practical people won out, and a center crank steam engine of the same time period was obtained. We overhauled it, and erected it on the same mortared stone foundation that the side crank engine had been mounted upon. Of course, I got the orders: "change nothing", no removing the original anchor bolts though they came nowhere near the anchor bolt locations in the replacement engine's bedplate . We made a "compromise bedplate" out of fabricated steel that used the original anchor bolts to tie it to the stone foundation, and had sole plates and anchor bolts for the replacement engine sticking up out of it. This was set, levelled, and grouted on the old foundation, then hidden with a wood trim "skirting". Seems like no one is the wiser. My claim is the steam engine is too well kept for an old sawmill, old sawmill engines were the bottom of the barrel as these things went, and often blew steam out of every gland, knocked, banged, and had shims cut from old tins that had held anything from oil to hams sticking out of every bearing. This engine runs like a watch, is spit shined, and has a walnut lagging on the cylinder, but it is definitely "period correct".

We did make a new valve rod (or "spindle" ?), and polished up the piston rod which showed no "necking". I believe on plenty of old steam engines, when the rods got worn or "necked down", the rods were turned to a consistent diameter from the piston or valve location to the other end. The rods often passed through what was called a "neck bushing" in the cylinder head or steam chest. Since the rods now had a necked area with larger diameters at each end, a new neck bushing was made, but it was made in two halves. This was sometimes made of babbitt, fitted into the stuffing box against the old neck bushing, and its purpose was to keep the packing from extruding out along the rod. Similarly, a split "follower ring" was made to go against the packing since the bore of the gland would otherwise be too loose on the rod. It was a stopgap measure, and in a plant where things were patched together, or the engineer was told: "we are watching costs.... and if that steam plant costs this company more than it already has, we'll scrap it and buy grid power and just send the steam thru a reducing valve for the dry kilns.." So, the engineers would dream up ways to keep their engines going (and keep their jobs along with that), no expenditures resulted, and the bean counter with green eyeshade in the front office never knew anything about the ingenuity of the steam plant forces.

I've seen old texts for stationary and marine engineers, and making a new or split neck bushing and follower ring was commonly done. One old text suggests pouring the babbitt into a round can (tin) of approximate size as a mold to cast the babbitt. The babbitt slug is then machined to make the split rings, and the can (tin) is machined off when the first cuts are taken.

I would feel that the use of the packing gland indicates that the original lubricant was an oil of some type. There wasn't that much of a selection back then ( and there really isn't much difference out side of internal combustion engine oils now), so the original was probably something on the order of DTE heavy. I would be very leery of any extreme pressure oils due to the red metal content. The circumferential scoring , as long as it is smooth is really going to become a rudimentary labyrinth seal. You'll want it to get moist with oil in operation but I don't think a drip is necessary. This intermittent use won't really have a cooling problem so as long as it is not dry you're good to go. Machines that run 24-7 usually are allowed the luxury of a drop every few minutes or so but the duty you are looking at won't need that.
It is also possible to use Joe's rolling pin idea to roll a taper in larger square packing. I like to use skived ( Cut at a 45 degree angle ) joints in packing . I've had them hold 3000psi, no problem. With your splash lube square cut joints will be fine.

tdmidget said:

I would feel that the use of the packing gland indicates that the original lubricant was an oil of some type. There wasn't that much of a selection back then ( and there really isn't much difference out side of internal combustion engine oils now), so the original was probably something on the order of DTE heavy. I would be very leery of any extreme pressure oils due to the red metal content. The circumferential scoring , as long as it is smooth is really going to become a rudimentary labyrinth seal. You'll want it to get moist with oil in operation but I don't think a drip is necessary. This intermittent use won't really have a cooling problem so as long as it is not dry you're good to go. Machines that run 24-7 usually are allowed the luxury of a drop every few minutes or so but the duty you are looking at won't need that.
It is also possible to use Joe's rolling pin idea to roll a taper in larger square packing. I like to use skived ( Cut at a 45 degree angle ) joints in packing . I've had them hold 3000psi, no problem. With your splash lube square cut joints will be fine.

Click to expand...

OK, thanks. I've got both 140wt, and DTE heavy on the shelf, so I can play around with them once I get it put back together. May skive the joints, just 'cause I can. Can't hurt.

Many thanks folks,
I'll let you know how it turns out.
Regards,
Brian

For small quantities of shaft packing material you could try a marine supply store or a big marina (West Marine comes to mind). Whey will have stuffing box packing in a variety of sizes and types.

Rick

This thread brings to mind a fella I knew many years ago. He was a plumber by trade,but worked in the power house so was expected to do pump pickings. We had four Gould chilled water pumps,40Hp vertical shaft.Starting and stopping these small pumps was how the operators regulated the pressure before VFDs. Pete took care of the packings on these pumps,which consisted of six rings and a lantern ring. Seemed like he was always working on one. One day when he was on vacation,one of them started leaking heavily. They sent the boiler maker up there to fix it. He pulled out the first three,and they looked fresh,but when the lantern ring was removed,it was a different story. The lower three were in bad shape. When Pete returned he was dubbed three ring Pete,after a character in a beer ad. The name stuck with him the rest of his life.