Baby Pacemaker

Pictures below of the 1952 14x30 Pacemaker that I recently acquired from an auction in Tennessee.

Lifting with straps was a piece of cake, even though I should have placed the wooden blocks at the ways rather than at the bottom of the bed.

It has the high range, 18-speed spindle with a D1-6 nose, and includes the taper attachment and the carriage stop. It seems to be in fine condition, though the carriage oil passages(or reservoir, perhaps) need to be cleaned out. I'm grateful for Panza's thread (and others) that covers removing the cross slide.

There are numerous minor dings on the inner ways for the tailstock. The hard outer ways, however, have a mirror finish on them, though I can feel a slight step at the base of the vee near the headstock. They seem to have worn evenly while shrugging off all impacts and scrapes.

I really like the clutched spindle as compared to the direct drive that my Okuma has. The Okuma is a very nice machine, but every time the spindle starts, the lights in my house dim. Actuating the Pacemaker clutch doesn't cause a noticeable voltage drop.

Parts book scan - thanks to Greg Menke for hosting this for me

http://pounceatron.dreamhosters.com/docs/atw/atw-pacemaker-parts-bulletin-20-1966.pdf

Thank you, John.

Baby Pacemaker is an oxymoron if I've ever heard one.

Any idea what it weighed? Guessing 5500-6000...

But it's the itty-bittiest Pacemaker of them all!

Bulletin 17 says it weighs 4,400 lbs, but it sure seemed heavier than that. The 8,000 lb pallet jack I used to horse it into its semi-permanent position had a surprising amount of trouble with it.

That is my dream lathe.

It's pretty bad that my first thought on the title was a lathe, and then a child with heart disease.... Shows what this site has done to me.

Big baby!

Is that 14" over the ways or cross slide?
You are a lucky man.

Congratulations, if possible post a working video of this machine.

I came really close to getting a similar one from the late 40's- complete with DRO's. Price was good- seller offered a pick from the related tooling for chucks etc- but the haul from Cleveland to Baltimore made it too much. I still regret a little not going for it OTOH it would have occupied a bunch more room than my little ATW High Duty does, and its been a fine lathe.

What is the horsepower of this "baby"? Looks like a workhorse!
JB

Timbosama said:

Pictures below of the 1952 14x30 Pacemaker that I recently acquired from an auction in Tennessee.

Lifting with straps was a piece of cake, even though I should have placed the wooden blocks at the ways rather than at the bottom of the bed.

It has the high range, 18-speed spindle with a D1-6 nose, and includes the taper attachment and the carriage stop. It seems to be in fine condition, though the carriage oil passages(or reservoir, perhaps) need to be cleaned out. I'm grateful for Panza's thread (and others) that covers removing the cross slide.

There are numerous minor dings on the inner ways for the tailstock. The hard outer ways, however, have a mirror finish on them, though I can feel a slight step at the base of the vee near the headstock. They seem to have worn evenly while shrugging off all impacts and scrapes.

I really like the clutched spindle as compared to the direct drive that my Okuma has. The Okuma is a very nice machine, but every time the spindle starts, the lights in my house dim. Actuating the Pacemaker clutch doesn't cause a noticeable voltage drop.

Click to expand...

Not much of a gunsmith's machine ,is it?

;-)

Nice machine!

From the latest backwards:

CalG: Gunsmithing? I'm sure I don't know what you could possibly mean,

JB: It's a 5hp Delco motor, from 1951 according to the tag.



Greg: I took a chance on this one, given that it was 1,300 miles away. The auctioneer sent me enough pictures to confirm that it had a taper attachment and that it wasn't a basket case from 10 feet away. As cranium wrote, I got lucky this time. Also, thank you very much for posting all the Pacemaker information at Vintage Machinery and hosting John Oder's parts book, too. Invaluable resources, and very considerate of you.

c.n.c.m.a.n: Can we post videos here? I'll look into how to post a youtube or a Facebook thing and post the link here. It may take me a while as I'm not particularly familiar with either of those platforms.

cranium: I've gotten lucky in a few things, God only knows why. It's a nominal 14", but its about 8.5" from the spindle centerline to the high point of the carriage wings and about 9" to the inner ways. So call it a 17-ish, I guess?



Finally, this was a really cool find. The picture below is of the head of one of the compound t-bolts in the removal window on the bottom of the cross slide. I took the compound off in the process of taking the cross slide off to clean it all up. Look at the end of the forged t-bolt. USA! boo-ya!

Cross slide removal details

As I mentioned in my original post, the carriage oil ways (by which I really meant the cross slide oil ways) seemed dirty enough to warrant disassembling things for cleaning. Panza and others have threads with pictures of the cross slide removed, but I thought it wouldn't be a terrible thing to include a few more pictures showing the intermediate steps.

Only the front face of the slide has a wiper. Given the amount of crud around the back, I'm thinking of making one for that side, too.

The wiper is a ~1/4" thick piece of dovetailed rubber held in by a dovetailed steel plate and 6 socket head cap screws.



Behind the wiper is the big slotted screw that sets and holds the gib. It came out easily for me, bringing the gib with it. You'll need to remove the gib to get the slide off the dovetail.



The three fasteners on the slide to the back of the compound are all that holds the slide to the cross feed screw. Remove all three, and you can push the slide in and out by hand. On this lathe, the fastener closest to the hand wheel had been tightened by a gorilla; the shiny marks on the end of the bolt were worn into it by the feed screw.



On mine, the oil hole on the spindle side of the carriage dovetail was blocked with crud. I dug it out with a pick and a small drill bit. There are little slotted head plugs on each end of both sides of the dovetail. The plugs cap the ends of the oil passages. The plugs removed easily and allowed me to flush the passage after I cleared out the oil hole.



I have a few more pictures, so I'll make another post below.

Cross slide removal details part 2

There was a good bit of crud in the oil grooves on the bottom of the slide.



Using the left plunger on the apron, I pumped two loads of mineral spirits through the cross slide part of the carriage system and followed that with two loads of clean, used ISO 32 hydraulic oil. If it's still visibly clean, I keep the old hydraulic oil (hydraulic, not motor) when I do an oil change on my tractors and use it for jobs like this instead of wasting the good stuff.

This flushing oil is generally the wrong weight and type, and it certainly isn't NAS class 6. But it's a lot cleaner than the machine's reservoirs and passageways, and it does a great job of flushing out junk. Flush, drain, refill with the proper stuff.

I discovered that the plunger pumps deliver the oil on the release stroke of the plunger. Therefore, pumping fast is ineffective; the pump spring needs a second or two to force the oil out of the pump and into the passageways. If you push the plunger in again too soon, the oil from the previous stroke doesn't flow out.

There are also plug screws in the oil galley passages where they are cross drilled. I used welding rod to clear the passages on the 20" HD.

So call it a 17-ish, I guess?​

Click to expand...

Most any of the related type sales Bulletins (like 16) will let you know actual on the 14 was AT LEAST 16 1/2 - like many other REAL lathe makers of the period.

My later 16 also says 3" more swing AND 6" more swing were standard options

Thumbnail scan of a page in Bul 102 from 1958 with the 14 by then an 18 actual

And substantially heavier