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Work starts on Smart and Brown 1024 Have questions.

shapeaholic

Stainless
Joined
Oct 14, 2003
Location
Kemptville Ontario, Canada
A couple of months ago I came to own a very nice, almost completely rebuilt Smart and Brown 1024 lathe. I've heard that they are regarded as highly as a Monarch 10EE, by those who know.
When I say "almost completely rebuilt" I mean that mechanically this machine is excellent. everything works as described and it has been converted to a VFD drive.

The work that has not been completed is the bed. The front slideway is worn about .005" and the carriage is also worn. It looks to me that the oiler may have stopped working at some point.



for reference here is the shape of the bed



The wear on the front slide about 10 inches to the left of the indicator in the first photo



The next two pictures show the markings on the bed. As usual it's hard to get good pictures...
I have tried to measure the areas where the marking is missing and I can't get a measurement on the .0005" indicator I'm using.



Now the question...
How to procede with the repair??
I thought I would;
1) scrape the flat ways, flat and straight ( very little scraping needed)
2) scrape the front way (the worn one) using the flats, and the tailstock V as reference
3) scrape the tailstock V straight and parallel with the front way.
4) scrape the carriage and align with Turcite.
5) I figure that there will be at least 012" of wear to make up for and I could scrape the turcite to allow the carriage to sit back in the correct alignment for gear and feed rod fit.

Any comments?
Is there a better way?

Thanks
Pete
 
The lathes.co.uk site indicates that you have flame hardened ways. I don't know how successful you will be at scraping them. The second problem is the amount of wear. That's a lot of scraping.

You might be better served to have the ways ground on a slideway grinder.

The primary question to me though is does the machine make good parts now? Lathes, at least manual engine lathes, can often be badly worn and still make very good parts. Only you can decide if the wear is worth fixing.
 
Ewlsey,
The bed is hard, but not near as hard as my Hendey T&G. I tried it and a carbide scraper cuts it ok.
As it is the machine does not turn straight. There is a length of about 5-6 inches near the chuck that turns .004" barrel shaped.
Unfortunately the only grinder that was remotely local (the guy who did my Hendey) went out of business several years ago.
Next nearest that I am aware of is in Toronto and that is 6 hours away.

RC99,
what you see is the mount for a taper attachment that has been adapted, not a tracer.
Unfortunately We don't know the history of this machine.
 
Hi Pete.

What do you have in way of straight edges and levels? The general idea is to take the surfaces down and keep the original geometry, the unworn surfaces can give you some clues there. You can indicate to them using the kingway but keep the indicator in tight, not extended as you have it. Feeler gauges under straight edges gives you the gist. Bubbles can be used to test for straightness and twist.
 
Have it ground professionally. Do the " Turcite " work yourself. You will need to remove enough metal to allow for the fitting of 1/16" thick " Turcite " at the least. I've never worked on such a small lathe but on the bigger stuff we usually fitted 1/8" thick " " Turcite ".

Regards Tyrone.
 
Unfortunately grinding is out of the question.
I have a very limited budget but lots of time.
Having said that I also believe at the bed is scrap-able. It is considerably softer than the Hendey T&G, and I did a bunch of scraping on it before I found someone to grind the bed for reasonable money.
I have some .016 turcite so will work toward using that to repair the front slideway once I get it straightened out.

Peter
 
Is this the version of an S&B with the gynormis 3 speed motor stuffed in too tight a space? Otherwise a great lathe...

Regards,
Lucky7
 
All my 2c, no bibles here.

This is what I mean talking about unworn surfaces. They might not be precision ground but they can get you in and keep you in the ballpark when aligning your surfaces. The tops of the vee ways might be ok too, easy to check with an SE and feelers.

attachment.php


Best not to scrape the surfaces flat but out of alignment to the headstock / screws etc. On my machine it seems this is what occurred previously as the bed has been hit with a sander, under the back half of the headstock to regain the alignment to the ways. The same is true in the pic for horizontal and vertical alignment. Does your headstock locate on flat ways only btw?

attachment.php


How I like to indicate from the kingway, keeping it tight to the centre of the gauge to keep errors low as poss when the gauge rides up and down over worn areas.

113719-20140805-143517.jpg



Hope im not preaching to the choir :). Looking forward to some scraping action ;)
All the best with it
D
 
You just have to be careful. On a quality machine like this, I'm sure all surfaces were ground and the unworn areas should be straight. If you look at some of the commodity lathes coming out of Taiwan and China, those surfaces look like they were hewn with an axe.

If you can't trust the reference surfaces, you have to use levels and something like a stretched wire to get the side to side straightness.
 
All my 2c, no bibles here.

>>

How I like to indicate from the kingway, keeping it tight to the centre of the gauge to keep errors low as poss when the gauge rides up and down over worn areas.

113719-20140805-143517.jpg



Hope im not preaching to the choir :). Looking forward to some scraping action ;)
All the best with it
D

"Choir" may not be those most in need. Some of the rest of us surely are.

Ex:

I think you have a post elsewhere of your-own-version of "King Way Tool". I'd appreciate a link. Or even a fresh photo.

I have a niggling concern wherein:

- one one way, a longish tube is used. This would 'average out' variance, much as the carriage itself has done / will again do.

- at the other side, the convention has been to attempt a single-point contact. OK. But ball tip does the reverse. Potentially exaggerates the 'local' position rather than average it out.

Is this actually optimal for assessing what needs done and measuring progress toward a goal?

Should there at least be a shorter, but still NOT 'single point' shoe, instead?

If so, should that 'slider' itself provide a ball-socket atop to the measuring structure?

Serious question - I don't even have a good 'guess' to offer.

I'm trying to reconcile how the sliding carriage actually 'sits' on a very long averaging bearing surface vs how we measure spans so very much shorter to get it back where it belongs.
 
At least in the original KingWay, the tube is ground internally to provide a relief in the middle, leaving only two shortish areas at each end to contact the V.
I think that your concern about the ball is at least partially valid. If I recall correctly, the original KingWay had a flat foot on that side.
However, in practice, even a flat foot could be locally deflected by a burr or something similar. The important things when using tools like the KingWay is to observe the behavior all along the bed while moving the instrument and not just at predefined positions, and to keep the indicator as close as possible to the legs, in order to avoid amplifying by an odd factor the (mostly angular) movements.
Paolo
 
You just have to be careful. On a quality machine like this, I'm sure all surfaces were ground and the unworn areas should be straight. .

They may be, but why are you sure?

The "unworn" surfaces were often on done a planer, a different machine and set up from the grinding. The grinding, often done with large grinder where a set of wheels on an arbor ground all surfaces at the same time. They would only set this this up to grind the bearing surfaces. Any inaccuracies from planing would remain - those surfaces are as straight as the planer but we have no info going into it as to whether they are as straight as the ground.

On the ball contact, I use a brass pad under the ball. Accomplishes the averaging so less needle flicker and also doesn't score a line down the freshly scraped way surface as you go back and forth
 
well, you also literally said you were sure on quality machine like that :)

I would tend to go along with Wes. Those 1024s are quality toolroom lathes that rivaled the Monarch, Rivett, Hendy T&G, etc...

Almost for certain a machine like that with hardened and ground ways has the surfaces ground.

Pete,

Could you make a jig and grind it yourself ?

Nice score! :cheers:

Cheers,
Alan
 








 
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