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Hardinge HLV refurb

Tfrench

Aluminum
Joined
Mar 18, 2019
Hi, thought I should probably start a bit of a project thread for the HLV I've been working on. Spied it on ebay just after Christmas. The pictures were awful, but after I looked through a few times and spotted the taper attachment I figured I would go for it. One very cold trip to Wales and some mild stress (guy had no idea how to load a lathe) I had it in my van and on the way home. This is getting it unloaded at our workshop:
Picking it up

Initial impressions were good - looked like everything was there and under all the grime even the paint looked ok. It came with lots of other stuff, which took some work to ID but I've now sold most of the extras which made the lathe very cheap. I took everything apart on the cross slide, cleaned and oiled it and reassembled:
Hardinge cross slide

The gearbox was in really good shape (once I figured how to get the cover off!)
Carriage gears

While I was at it I removed the carriage completely to measure the front of the bed for wear. I know it won't tell the whole story but I've read its a good indicator of what condition the lathe is in. It was months ago now and I forgot to write down the exact measurement, but it was very very minor.
Bed measurements

Up until this point I'd not been sure whether to keep it or sell it, but having got this far and with it in such good shape I decided it was a keeper. I didn't want to power it up until I had all the crud and dust cleared out from under the carriage and checked it all over.
 
Connected it up to the power and everthing worked, which was a really nice surprise. Had to take the brake solenoid apart and oil everything, but it works now. Definetely a keeper now! With that decided I thought it probably deserved some paint on the cabinet, so I stripped it and rollered it. It was the original colour, just flaking off the galvanised steel. It also has a brass cast nametag of the (I assume) original owner - WT Henley, a manufacturer of telecoms equipment still in business today.
old paint gone

I was going to leave it with just painting the cabinet as the paint on the lathe was still pretty good, but it looked really weird so I went the whole hog with it. I also fitted a sheet of stainless to the original splashback. I extended it to the right side as well to give me some room for storage.
Painting done

The latest thing I've been working on is adding some better drawers to the cabinet for collet storage.
5 C collet storage

It's getting close to done now. I've got to take the carriage oil pump out again as it's not working, and there's quite a few little finishing off jobs but the bulk of it is done. I'd like to add a DRO as well.
 
Nice job. I like the collet drawers.

Check the base of your compound they are more often than not rather bent. That causes people to wrench the locking pin down in an effort to stop the compound rotating, until it seizes or shears (or both).
 
Nice job. I like the collet drawers.

Check the base of your compound they are more often than not rather bent. That causes people to wrench the locking pin down in an effort to stop the compound rotating, until it seizes or shears (or both).

That design for the compound swivel is, I think, one of the biggest blunders on those hardinge lathes. Mine (granted, very high mileage, SN 330 HLVH) had the top of the cross slide badly bowed and the bottom of the compound also pretty badly distorted. Took a lot of hand scraping to get that to seat properly again. I found this out of course when the eccentric pin snapped off inside.

One drills a hole opposite the pin from the other side, to punch out the remainder. Then tap it, put a setscrew in there, and stamp "OIL."
 
That looks pretty dang good considering what it looked like before.

I bought an HLV-H back in November of 2019, and just bought another one last friday. I’ve been cleaning on it all week and pulled the Plug out of the carriage since the plunger is bent in the pressure oiler itself. Any chance you’ve sourced parts from other suppliers?
Hardinge wants 675.00 for this little pressure oiler that’s no bigger than
3/4 x 1.5 inches or so.
 








 
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