Reason for Lodge and Shipley carriage shims solved

Years ago the firm where I am employed purchased a 12-speed 14 inch LS lathe of WWII vintage at a vocational school auction. There were the usual issues with the machine, and while most were taken care of long ago, the fact that there was a stack of shims between the right end of the carriage and apron had been eating at me for a long time, until last week. To make a long story short, the problem was caused by a less than stellar mechanic. There are two ALMOST identical gibs on the back edge of the apron that are for preventing the front of the carriage from lifting off the bed ways. The only difference between the gibs is that one has an approximately 1/8 wide groove milled on its lower side, in order to straddle a guide pin. The guy that worked on this machine last crossed up these gibs, and instead of figuring why the apron would not seat properly to the bottom of the carriage, did a barn yard fix with the shims to keep the apron from wracking as the bolts were tightened. There is a slight guide pin bruise on the wrong gib, where the master mechanic tightened the bolts in his attempt to get the apron to seat into its proper position. Surprisingly, considering all the mechanical mis alignments this shim job created, and lack of oil being pumped to the carriage, the lathe is in pretty good shape for its age.

No doubt others have come across some really weird situations where machines have been assembled incorrectly. What is your craziest discovery of this nature?

Well, it's not really an "incorrectly", but this bit puzzled me recently. I was dismantling the tailstock for my Springer and discovered this:



One boss for the two tailstock-offset screws is removable. And, I suspect, not intentionally- I think that's a repair of some sort. But why? There's no damage to the rest of the tailstock indicating a crash of some kind, the screws themselves are cherry, and the other boss is cast in. The webbing underneath appears to have been milled to clear the nut- if it were intended to be there for some reason, one would assume they'd have cast in the clearance for the nut.

The only two plausible scenarios I can come up with is either somebody stripped the original boss and they didn't think there was enough iron left to properly sleeve and retap, or since this was a Wartime lathe (apprx. '43, we think) it could be the casting had a flaw there (void, incomplete fill, mismachined in production, etc.) and they installed this block as a repair, to salvage the casting (and possibly the work that'd already been done, like scraping.)

The 'evidence' for the latter is that the block appears to have been planed, not milled. A relatively recent (as in, within the last 30 years) repair probably would have been done on a vertical mill. The tooling marks, however, clearly show straight planing marks, not circular milling or side milling marks.

Won't hurt anything, of course, just a curiosity.

Doc.

Necessary when doing a steep set-over taper or a long taper.

Do you mean that may have been a factory mod, as a way to increase the total possible offset of the tailstock? If so, is that a common feature on larger lathes?

Or is it more likely this was done by an owner at some point?

Doc.

I've posted it hear before - my Beaver mill had the crossfeed dial on the knee, and the knee's dial on the crossfeed. They don't just swap either, different bores. And of course the graduations were all wrong. Came that way from the factory. I bet it wrecked a few parts,

locoguy said:

Years ago the firm where I am employed purchased a 12-speed 14 inch LS lathe of WWII vintage at a vocational school auction.

Click to expand...

It makes you wonder if the "teacher" did that.

There were several coats of paint over the shims, as well as the rest of the machine, so it is doubted that a teacher did it.......maybe a student that liked to paint.

It wouldn't surprise me if the students painted it, maybe several times ... but based on my admittedly brief exposure to voc ed nearly 50 years ago I imagine the teacher allowing a student to dismantle and repair a machine... most of the time they were trying to avoid letting you run them, either out of fear you'd get hurt or because they liked the machines and couldn't stand to see them abused.