Design improvements for war badge SB bend heavy 10 lathe?

[Gard]

I am working on rebuilding this lathe for home hobby shop use. So far I made a new cross slide lead screw, installed new nut., scraped in the compound slide, rebuilt lantern components, made a new tail stock clamp, Replaced some Gits oilers, made new handle and rebuilt collet rack I have just finished scrapeing the saddle and cross slide dovetails. So what else should I add to the to-do list before reassembling these parts?

I still need to clean up and perhaps scrape the taper attachment and I can see there is no felt in the carriage so I will pull that apart and clean it up.

As near as I can tell this lathe model never had these 3 features:
1) Any kind of felt or protection for the saddle cross slide, compound V way or tailstock. The only felts are on the saddle to bed
2) No way to get oil into any of the sliding surfaces except squirting it on the exposed surface and cranking the handle back and forth?
3) No way to lock compound or cross slide like the milling machine has.

Any thoughts on if I should just put it back the way it was originally. Or should I add other features to improve the design? Felt wipers, oilers, slide locks, anything else?

Not sure I would want Gits oil cups hanging off everywhere there but perhaps drilled holes with ball oilers. Now that the compound rest and cross slide V ways are renovated perhaps there is no real need for some kind of slide locks?

The bottom of the saddle has some wear where it contacts the bed V ways, its about 0.024" on the head stock and 0.012" on tailstock sides. I am not planning on attempting to scrape or have the bed ground so should I add some shim stock to the saddle, does this require milling pockets in the saddle or is there some material I can get in about the correct thickness? It's tempting to just relieve the center some and put it back together.

 

[texasgeartrain]

You scraped in the cross slide, so I'm guessing you know, or learned something about scraping and leveling etc. You could put spotting blue the bed ways and check contact area of saddle to the bed.

You could decide to raise the saddle with turcite or other. You could also scrape saddle flatter for better contact, and an advantage with South Bends is you can shim qcgb, rack, and leadscrew end bearing down. The reason to raise a saddle on most lathes is the alignment of leadscrew as it passes through apron, other lathe manufactures can't shim qcgb down. And you can shim the rack down, so that gear teeth from pinion on apron contact rack for nice backlash.

On a South Bend, qcgb, rack, and the LS end bearing mount on underside of bed way, and can be shimmed down.

I'm sure you can find felts for tail stock, and add those. Cross slide felts is not a terrible idea at all, though South Bend has not typically used them. Dial side would be easy to add, Taper attachment side might be trickier.

As far as lube goes, yea shooting it on exposed surfaces, and driving over it, is how its done. Not a prob on a hobby machine, and it lasts a good while.

No locks needed on cross slide, its not a mill. On a mill, the work is attached to the mill table, locking certain directions on a mill helps accuracy and finish. But the forces on a mill can change direction or have multiple directions. On a lathe, the forces are predominately in one direction, and the work is held by the chuck, not the cross slide.

 

[duckfarmer27]

2) No way to get oil into any of the sliding surfaces except squirting it on the exposed surface and cranking the handle back and forth?

That looks like nice work. When I did mine - which was just a clean/refurbish - I drilled holes in the saddle for way oil. I did use small Gits cups but ball oilers probably would have been better; having said that they have not been an issue for me. I also drilled a hole and added a Gits cup for the apron hand wheel so that could get a little more oil than provided by the felts. With just hobby use I'm sure it does not make that much of a difference but it seemed like a couple reasonable additions to me.

Enjoy the lathe.

Dale

 

[Gard]

I am a beginning scraper, I have made a couple of SE and some small tools, this lathe is my first learning experience with dovetails. It was in pretty rough shape with some missing and broken parts, there was significant sideways shake of the compound and cross slide in the middle of travel and binding at ends. The strangest thing I found so far is the cross slide lead screw had been replaced with right hand thread so it moved the wrong direction when turning the handle. I made a new screw using left hand acme all thread and designed it to use ball thrust bearings instead of poorly fit washers. I wonder if some previous owner built the screw backwards on purpose or put it back together and said oh shit....LOL.

Good point about about alignment to the leadscrew and rack. I assume there is some wear on the bed but have not looked at it yet. There are some ridges on the saddle that are supporting the metal block in the photo above, the ridges appear to be original surfaces so I think bringing turcite up to slightly above this level would be a good starting point. I could mill the bottom of the saddle but it would take multiple setups on my small mill, sandblasting would be a lot quicker. Is there a minimum recommended thickness for turcite or other material? I would need about 0.012" on one side and 0.024" on other. Any guess if this amount of wear is starting to cause alignment issues?

When you drilled additional holes for oil did you also add grooves to distribute the oil?

 

[texasgeartrain]

Richard King wrote a post on adding turcite to a Monarch saddle, which Monarch generally refers to as a carriage. This post is a little hard to read, as he didn't edit it, but the basic foundation is there. Also Monarch uses 1 vee and 1 flat for the the carriage, where South Bend uses 2 vees. Post #6:

Monarch Lathe Restoration Attempt (Fixing Someone Else's Botched Rebuild)

Hello all, I'm a young machinist starting his own job shop and have purchased some equipment. One piece being my beloved 1946 12 CKK Monarch Lathe. I have been researching this lathe and have learned it quite well. Been through the headstock and i'm in the process of rebuilding the apron. I...

www.practicalmachinist.com

To surmise, I'll tell you not to use the ridges in saddle as a guide or gauge. Scrape them flat. And:
1. Level bed, front to rear, plus longitudinally.

2. Work at tail stock end, as bed will be less worn there. When finished, apron pinion backlash to rack will be close there, but looser near chuck. If you work near chuck first, pinion will bind toward TS end. So better to get carriage height set at TS end.

3. Install qcgb, LS end bearing, carriage and apron.

4. Again working from TS end, Have 8 sets of feeler blades, to deal with two vee ways on all 4 corners of carriage. Using the 8 sets of feeler blades, begin to raise the carriage/saddle. Raise until backlash of apron pinion to rack is close or in spec. But also ensure that leadscrew is not being raised by apron, you can do that by zero-ing a dial indicator at 12 oclock on LS.

4.5: Also while raising saddle/carriage, make sure the saddle is level. Front to rear, and longitudinally. By using 8 sets of feeler blades on all corners, you'll begin to see how much turcite to add to each side of both vee ways, to get both height correct plus to remain level.

5. One of your final adjustments when scraping the turcite will be to get cross slide to a very slight minus on a facing cut. Not dead parallel or convex. Maybe a -.002" of full cross slide travel for very minor concavity.

 

[mattthemuppet]

I put ball oilers in all four wings of my heavy 9 saddle, plus oilers and wipers for the tailstock. Makes a big difference

 

[Gard]

Thanks for that description of how to fit the saddle to the ways, that makes a lot of sense. I think I may try to modify it by adjusting shims under both sides of the front V way and putting a jack screw under the back. I find it way easier to level things that are supported by 3 points. When I get it level and fit to the rack
on the right side, I will slide it to the left and check for alignment to spindle as you say. Once I am happy, I will measure what shims are required on the back.
It would be tempting to make the shims from turcite and then just glue them in place so little if any scraping is required. I guess another option would be to use the shim thickness to calculate how much metal to machine away from the saddle V way to fit a standard thickness of turcite stock.

Excellent idea to add ball oilers to the saddle wings and tailstock (as well as felts there). Got a photo of how you did it?

 

[mattthemuppet]

here's my build thread, lots of little mods in there

New to me 1929 wide (heavy?) 9" long bed and overhead silent drive casting trade

hi all, I came across this SB wide 9 project a while ago while helping a "new to lathe work" guy set up his Clausing and last week he offered it to me for what he had in it as he has to move. Plus sides are it was a price I could afford (more or less) at $400, everything had been cleaned, it...

www.practicalmachinist.com

 

[Gard]

Nice job on that build I always feel good when I can take something apart and restore or improve it, my hats off if you can do that starting with a basket case. Have you been happy with how all the extra ball oilers worked out?

 

[mattthemuppet]

Thanks, it was a lot of fun and it's a pleasure to use, especially now I've got my Pratt Burnerd adjust tru on it. Thankfully the guy I got it from was pretty good about keeping all the stuff together. I made one extra nut for the apron, which I then found after I finished the lathe

The ball oilers are great. The cross slide one doesn't get both sides equally but the chuck side way gets enough and the tailstock side way just drips the extra out. The carriage oilers work very well, both to keep things moving smoothly and to flush any crap out that makes it past the wipers. Still got a few things to do - countershaft step pulley, thread dial and extended tailstock screw - but it's working great so far!

 

[Gard]

I have done some measurements on the bed using my homemade sort of camelback straightedge and feeler gauges on the sloped bearing surfaces, there is low spots on the front V of 0.018" and back V of 0.012". This concentrated in the area under the chuck. The rest is as straight as I can measure with a SE. I think I will probably reassemble the lathe and see how it works with the newly scraped compound, cross slide and most recently the taper attachment. The taper attachment dovetail scrapeing progressed well but still took awhile. I feel my skills are slowly improving. I might even put some paint on the parts as this always seems to make tools work better LOL.

Can anyone give me an idea what it would cost to get the bed ground, milled or shaped into alignment? Any suggestions on who does this kind of work in the Vermont area or is it best to ship?
I doubt there is any practical way to add material in this short area of the V way?


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