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South Bend 10" disassembly, hopefully reassembly.

Aklot

Plastic
Joined
Jun 9, 2017
I've spent the past few weeks taking the lathe I purchased apart. I'm hoping I documented the process well enough to put it back together so here's the, euh... 20%-of-the-way point? or 3 weeks of progress. I'll disclaimer you, I've never owned a lathe, so 3 weeks time most of which was spent gathering info on whatever I was doing so I didn't destroy anything. I've been looking into machining (pure hobby) since November-ish knowing pretty much nothing, and after much reading, learning, and wearing a stupid smile while watching thisoldtony, this is my first leap.

I never intended to go the second-hand-lathe-route, but this thing was far too pretty, and only cost its kilogram weight in Euros... That's for always giving me inches when I google things by the way, imperial dogs! Wait, why is this cross slide dial multiplying everything by 25.4? I should look into that.

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2058RKX9. ~$560. Micrometer stop, that multifix thing (don't look at me I didn't put that tool in there), Rohm 3 jaw and smaller Cushman 3 jaw, South Bend 4 jaw and an 80mm 4 jaw with “The Burnerd” on the face. 2x Albrecht, a Rohm, and a Kawasaki keyless chuck so big I have to hold it by the shank and heave it onto my shoulder to move it. Seller also threw me a bunch of bronze stock he had lying around. There are a fair number of gears as well, some with serious rust, most fine.

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Headstock plate is worse off than the gear box plate. There's another plate from the factory that purchased the machine in '49 according to the Serial Number card. They merged in '67, so the paint job is at least that old. They're also likely responsible for taking the original switch off and putting the service hour counter up in its place.

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QCGB. Bit dirty, but no rust except on the tumbler from what I could tell.

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I eyeballed the lead screw. I'm sure there is wear I just didn't have the experience to see it. I tried to lock the carriage down to test bed wear, but couldn't quickly figure out how (Mr Ficken is dissapointed). In order to not look as stupid as I felt I just ran it left to right and checked resistance. There was some, but with no frame of reference I couldn’t say more than that. The biggest mistake I’ve made is taking the lathe apart before figuring out wear on the ways. Backlash on the carriage was 1/15th of a turn maybe? I'm guesstimating, but it felt like nothing. The cross slide had near-none although the compound had this weird thing where the dial pulled away from the plate when drawing it back:

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I still don't know why this is. To take the assembly out I'd need 1 or 2 spanners, and they are a little expensive.

Right, so about that gear train.

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I have 36 different gears in a box, not counting 2 different OD 40T gears that fit the spindle or those twin gears. Not one of them centers on that shaft and meshes properly with the twin, never mind the appropriate stud gear. I imagined one day I would get a neat-o import lathe with a disgustingly written manual and pretty drawings to ease myself into understanding gear trains, not this. But it gets worse.

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Treachery! I'm fairly certain this reversing lever doesn't belong on my lathe. Is that even a reversing lever?

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This doesn’t fit on my gearbox. I've not seen this in any of the parts manuals I've read. I've seen the banjo with the two fixed holes for the idlers/compounds (I think this is the one that is supposed to go on the single tumbler lathes), the single slot banjo, and a double slot though that has the shorter slot at an angle to the longer, not running parallel.

I sat down and started indexing all the gears I had. I counted teeth for any that didn't have it printed on them, noted hole sizes, pitches, and anything out of the ordinary. So far all I have is mostly 16DP gears, some 17 and a few odd ones I can’t place. What looks very much like it goes onto the gearbox shaft has a DP (18) that makes it not mesh with anything else. Someone also DIY-ed a compound gear out of an 85 and 40 tooth gear. It has a bushing and a nut that holds it in place, but maybe also serves to lock the gears. I can’t get it off. When I found it, it had a nut and bolt that allows me to strap it to the banjo. The gearbox shaft key is also missing, though I do have the original nut.

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Don’t know what to make of these. I have 3. 34T, 42T, and a 45T. They have “Upper 20 TP1”, “Upper 14 TP1”, and “Lower 14 TP1” on their faces respectively (it is a ‘1’ not an ‘I’). I’m starting to think someone used this box as a gear dump, and I’m sitting here thinking it’s for my lathe and I’m an idiot for not knowing where it goes, when in fact it belongs in some manual blender from 1950 or something.

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2x 100, 2x127. What bothers me is that these 127T gears are here, and someone even went through the trouble to make one of them usable, yet there is pretty much nothing else facilitating metric conversion. I’m also missing several gears for standard imperial functionality. This is why they recommend to not start your ‘career’ with a restoration project. Learn how a machine works, then build it, not the other way around. If you can’t tell where a gear belongs, or whether that gear even belongs on the machine you have, you’re in over your head. I’m at collapse depth.

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Moving along further into “why the hell did you buy this thing?” territory. That poor bull gear has 6 missing teeth. It’s unusable in this state, and why I originally considered just greasing and stashing the machine as a future project when I bought it. I enjoyed disassembly and cleaning so much I’d have a hard time making myself do that now. I’m missing a bearing adjuster screw, and the shims were bits of broken off feeler gauges. Metric ones! The pin in the bull gear that engages the cone pulley feels extremely loose, like I could blow on it to move it over. The spring hardly does anything. Back gear + pin slipping back into pulley seems like it could rip those teeth off, though that’s amateur conjecture.

I saw Halligan142 press his bull gear onto the spindle with a screw through the spindle bore and figured I could do the same. After “pffft”-ing through numberous “use a press” suggestions, I found "this man doing it the screwy way.". I’ll leave it on until I find a replacement gear. I can’t tell the difference between my bull gear and the ones on Ebay, but the part numbers don’t match and I think the spindle size might be smaller (mine is 2”).

I shouldn’t have removed the headstock. I googled “aligning headstock” and all I got was guides on how to align the tailstock. I presumed that if nobody asked it couldn’t be that hard, so I took it off to make moving the bed easier. I’ve since found out that it’s probably because nobody is stupid enough to remove the thing. I also didn’t mark the front of the back bearing when I took it off.

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This was far too dry when I removed it. The bearing oiler cups are full and the wicks drenched, but the cone pulley was apparently not worthy of lubrication. I can barely feel grooves with my finger, so it might look worse than it is. I tried to clean the thrust bearing but it sounds and feels like there is dirt stuck in the rollers.

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Can’t feel grooves here with my finger. I don’t understand what caused the indentations from the bearing expanders. They’re supposed to pull up, and I’m 100% certain I removed the screws and cover in the correct order. Here I tried to put the sleeve back on because I realized I had forgotten to mark the front and wanted to see if I could tell the difference. The expander is marked, fortunately. The retaining nut just has the washer-bearing-thing, I’ll replace that with an actual bearing should I ever get that far. Apparently you’re supposed to hold the wick down with a rod stuck in where the cups go when you replace the spindle. I had the wicks out, but I don’t understand why this is recommended. Unless you’re channeling Michael Jordan and slam dunk the spindle into place, I don’t see how you could possibly crush the wicks or springs. You’re more likely to push the tube into the housing. The spindle is flawless from what I could tell, can’t feel a groove or mark with finger or nail. Nothing wrong with the back gear, I left it where it was.

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I read that the back shaft (from this view) is a hassle to remove and replace. The gear that meshes with the clutch lever has a silly offset pin. I figured I’d leave that alone and just remove everything else. I didn’t have a wrench that fit the nut on the front shaft to remove that either, so all I could do was work my poor toothbrush to death. The clutch lever was difficult to move left at times. The oil tube was bent so I pushed that back to line up with the distribution hole in the tumbler, and then understood why the gearbox plate says to put the tumbler on 192 before oiling. I put the shaft and tumbler back in. If it turns out I’ll rebuild the machine I’ll do a better cleaning job than picking individual chips out of the gears in the back with tweezers.

2 parts due to image limit
 
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Not too bad. The other side of the inexperience-coin is the joy of exploring a little. I took the apron off and for a good hour just sat there turning knobs and handles, looking at how the mechanism meshed together to produce some effect, figuring out how what did what. Anyway I pulled the crossfeed key out and it’s in great shape. The gears don’t look too bad either except the worm gear, though I suppose they hardly take much of a load.

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Is that grease? Are you supposed to put grease in there?

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I’m pretty sure those chips sticking to your gears is why you don’t want grease. I’m also pretty sure I have yet to actually produce any chips so I’ll be quiet now and look into it.

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Wear.

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Apparently this has a hole for oil I’d probably have missed if it wasn’t for watching Halligan142 saying it fills up with gunk in his disassembly.

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Decent profile I think.

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Didn’t see a reason to remove the half nut lever. It turns fine and the pin looks like it’s out to wreck my 0% pin-mushrooming rate. Whenever I tried to lock the clutch I’d have to hold the nut behind it or it would spin free, which doesn’t seem like it’s supposed to happen. When I tried to actually remove that nut it was proper stuck. Though I got it to come off eventually, it fought me and suffered some apprentice marks in the process. I’m missing 2 oilers at the top of the apron. The list of things I need (and their accompanying US-EU shipping costs) keeps growing. There was a good inch thick layer of gunk and grease sitting at the bottom of the casting that I scooped out. I’ll have to manually clean it as I don’t think I’m up to repainting the entire machine, so I can’t dunk it in a bath overnight.

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The threads on the cross slide and compound were fairly clean. I’m missing some caps/screws for the oil holes, and had to dig swarf out of those.

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The compound has taken a serious beating. I have no clue how wear like this happens, but it worries me more than a little.

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The carriage guides are worn to hell. I know they’re supposed to, I just don’t know what’s reasonable. The wear is also uneven. It’s extreme on one side and minor on the other end. I’m unsure how this affects proper functioning, if at all.

I’m a good 1300 euros away from what I had intended to throw at a new import (don’t underestimate how little that buys me in this country!). I’d like advice on how to obtain parts from across an ocean without paying more than a return flight in shipping all of them individually. Just getting the gear train functional, the cover, bull gear, bearings, belt (yes, I cut mine, don’t want to talk about it), headstock shims, oilers for the apron, obviously a rebuild guide/pack from Mr. Wells, but most of all: Should I? Maybe I’m missing more than I think and/or things are in worse condition than I think and I can’t tell.

I need to figure out how to check the bed’s wear. Keith Rucker had a video "here” where he does it with some 1-2-3 blocks and machinist levels. I don’t have machinist levels, or 1-2-3 blocks, but I might have to suck up that purchase as penance for not doing it the right way. The flat on the operator side should be untouched, I might be able to check the V-way using that as a baseline, though I'll have to make sure I understand the process to avoid errors. Off to read more!
 
I've got several bull gears laying around, what part number is on yours? You can likely bend the spring to put more tension on it and put it back in and it should work better.

The headstock aligns itself on the ways, just make sure its really clean when you put it all back together.
 
I've got several bull gears laying around, what part number is on yours? You can likely bend the spring to put more tension on it and put it back in and it should work better.

15R1 (I'm 99% sure that's an R). The 15NK1 on Ebay have a 1 5/8ths center. I got the spring to snap properly, though sadly it'll never get to display it's pin-locking-fu on this abomination of a bullgear.

My posts have to be confirmed by moderators, which is why the second part that includes the bit about being in Europe and needing a way to ship numerous items across an ocean without going into debt over shipping costs is a little slow.
 
My posts have to be confirmed by moderators, which is why the second part that includes the bit about being in Europe and needing a way to ship numerous items across an ocean without going into debt over shipping costs is a little slow.

Now you know how people feel that have European machines and live in America...welcome to the jungle! LOL

Shipping can add some serious coin to your parts order...:(
 
Needs a bit of work. But it's mostly all there.

Do not bother with trying to "check the amount of wear" on the bed or carriage, or
anything else on this machine. That is a waste of time. It is well-worn. That's all you
need to know before you go ahead and put it into service. It will probably do nearly
every task you put to it.

The single most serious issue is the right side bearing expander. A previous owner has
pried the bearing cap off with a screwdrive without having first removed the two expander
screws. Worse, the cap was replaced and socked down hard, the dimples on the bearing
shell exactly match the underside of the bearing expander.

Often these shells can be re-worked. Key is that the upset be gently filed out and that the
expander can still grasp the dovetail on the shell. If you can re-work the shell material
without removing any material, to re-form the shape, that is the best. Basically body
work on a tiny scale. Worst case scenario is you need to purchase a new shell for this.

Don't worry about the back gears for now.
 
15R1 (I'm 99% sure that's an R). The 15NK1 on Ebay have a 1 5/8ths center. I got the spring to snap properly, though sadly it'll never get to display it's pin-locking-fu on this abomination of a bullgear.

My posts have to be confirmed by moderators, which is why the second part that includes the bit about being in Europe and needing a way to ship numerous items across an ocean without going into debt over shipping costs is a little slow.

I have many, many of the parts you need. I needed a few parts for my restoration and found a cheap donor machine I picked over. I checked a gear I have and it's 1.9975" hole diameter. Pay shipping and I'll donate it to a worthy cause.
 
The dings inside the compound are probably from the tool post not being tight, or from trash being clamped between the compound and the T nut. If the T nut doesn't fit properly that might also do it. It may be worth making yourself a wide T nut that spans the damaged area if it concerns you. Take a file to knock out any bits that stick down into the T slot and just pretend its not there.

Bull gear can probably be fixed if you've got a mill and an indexing head. Braze the gap between the missing teeth and re-cut them. It won't quite be perfect but it will make it go.

The gap on the cross feed dial is probably wear in the bushing. if you pull that out I expect you'll find a pocket worn into it, or possibly the thrust washer that belongs in there is worn or missing. I'd probably make that up with a new washer to make up for it.
 








 
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