Charles Dolan
Hot Rolled
- Joined
- Apr 28, 2006
- Location
- Montreal Canada
Having now completed the renovation of my Sag 14 I am now running the machine.
I really should just say “enough dismantling to get it into my basement and very careful cleaning and painting” rather than renovation.
My question relates to the amount of oil leakage I should tolerate from the feed shaft worm seals.
As you may remember this lathe was originally fitted with an hydraulic copying drive through the feed shaft and cross slide and clearly this has provided 99% of the carriage driving power throughout the machines former life (the gear box is virtually band new showing no wear or even tooth contact and the halfnuts and lead screw are the same). Because of all this use the feed shaft coupling to the hydraulic motor had loosened and was allowing the shaft to run eccentrically. The spherical ball bearing was still in excellent shape so I made up a new coupling and this has brought the running of the shaft into acceptable limits.
However before fitting the new coupling there was a serious leak of oil from the feedshaft seals, particularly so at the higher speeds. With the new coupling this is reduced by 80% but is still there at speed. At lower revs the oil coming out of the apron seems about normal i.e. A few drops after half an hours feeding. This is certainly within my “comfort zone, but at the higher speed I would like to see less oil in the pan.
As changing the seals is quite a performance I am looking for reassurance that these always leak to some extent and that I am not going to regret leaving them as they are, at least for the time being.
Once more I would like to say how much I appreciate the help that I have received from you all since joining this Forum I have been fooling around with machine tools most of my life and have previously muddled through with the inevitable problems a “new machine” has, but access to this global race memory is just magic.
Charles.
I really should just say “enough dismantling to get it into my basement and very careful cleaning and painting” rather than renovation.
My question relates to the amount of oil leakage I should tolerate from the feed shaft worm seals.
As you may remember this lathe was originally fitted with an hydraulic copying drive through the feed shaft and cross slide and clearly this has provided 99% of the carriage driving power throughout the machines former life (the gear box is virtually band new showing no wear or even tooth contact and the halfnuts and lead screw are the same). Because of all this use the feed shaft coupling to the hydraulic motor had loosened and was allowing the shaft to run eccentrically. The spherical ball bearing was still in excellent shape so I made up a new coupling and this has brought the running of the shaft into acceptable limits.
However before fitting the new coupling there was a serious leak of oil from the feedshaft seals, particularly so at the higher speeds. With the new coupling this is reduced by 80% but is still there at speed. At lower revs the oil coming out of the apron seems about normal i.e. A few drops after half an hours feeding. This is certainly within my “comfort zone, but at the higher speed I would like to see less oil in the pan.
As changing the seals is quite a performance I am looking for reassurance that these always leak to some extent and that I am not going to regret leaving them as they are, at least for the time being.
Once more I would like to say how much I appreciate the help that I have received from you all since joining this Forum I have been fooling around with machine tools most of my life and have previously muddled through with the inevitable problems a “new machine” has, but access to this global race memory is just magic.
Charles.