Older Reid Surface Grinder feed belt tightening

Hey guys,

I've got an older Reid surface grinder that I've had for several years. It needed some rehab before use, and I didn't have time to mess with it. I dug into it this evening, got all the old dried grease (yes, grease!) off of the ways, and coated with hydraulic oil. The gears and shafts inside are all well lubricated. What I found is that when started, everything runs smoothly and quietly, but as soon as I engage the table feed, the power feed shaft stops and the belt slips.

I dug into it a little deeper, and the power feed belt is very loose. I can't seem to figure out how to tighten it. There is a jacking screw under the housing that the power feed shaft and pulley are mounted in, and I tried using that to tighten up the belt. But when I do that, it puts a bind on the shaft and it won't turn at all.

Any tricks to this? I've included pictures of the machine in a Google Photos album here... I'd love any direction any of you could give me. As you can see, the grinder drive belt is pretty new, but the feed belt is quite old.

Photos: Shared album - Matt Jorgensen - Google Photos

So, my grinder is basically the brother to the knees in n this thread: Line Shaft Driven Reid Brothers Surface Grinder This guy indicated his was serial 445 and mine is 443. My belts are routed a little different than his. But, from the looks of it, we are looking at 20s or 30s. Anyone have one of these?

Hey deere!

As a disclaimer, unfortunately I don't have any resources for you regarding the tensioning of the belt, however I do have a reid surface grinder of the same vintage. 495 for me prior to adopting a model 1,2, 3, a, b,c, etc. convention.

In my case, I'm missing a lot of the ratcheting mechanism for the auto feed and also the belt tensioning components in the back are missing, which makes it difficult to provide you with directly useful information. The holes in the back of my casting appear to have been filled with some putty, whether this was done at the factory or not I don't know, however I'm inclined to believe someone did this after the fact as it wouldn't make much sense for the factory to include a gearbox drivetrain mechanism but fill the tensioning mechanisms mounting bosses on the back with some putty; I guess it would be conceivable that the belt drive was driven through another system of pulleys driven from the main spindle-motor/electric motor coupled to the spindle , however I don't recall seeing any evidence of this in tge currently disassembled pieces of the unit that I own.

Despite all this, I think I might be able to add some perspective, despite my lack of operator experience compared to others, only because I have a tangible unit in my possession and am currently pursuing automatic feed issues like driving the gear box,and also the ratchet wheel/pawl/link/(selector on the right of the right hand-wheel).

I guess at this point, and it would be very self-serving above all to request, is that you post some more detailed images of the following:

Auto feed assembly operator controls with the hand wheels removed

No need for gearbox images, as mine seems to be complete, but I would request a picture of the slide stops attached to the top table and how they interface with the paddle bar (The one that must be removed to take off the gearbox top plate casting) beneath the bottom table. The one that goes flip-flop

More pictures of the drive train in the back with emphasis on the location of the two bosses (in my case) on the rear of the base casting which the tensioning arm mechanisms attach, this will directly help me and also help me contribute to your pursuits.

Finally another image of the spindle motor and a view from the back of that area where there may have been provisions for a drive pulley attachment in line with the spindle shaft. Your configuration might be totally different than mine, as mine unfortunately has a generic motor with a coupler mounted on a frame slaved to the z access casting which houses the spindle bearings, and is basically a best attempt at replicating what should have been there to begin with.

So finally, after stumbling on this post, I realize that I'll be living with manual grinding until I can replicate the missing parts, and also that our documentation of these assemblies may be one of the few good resources for these old pieces of equipment. I hope we can provide some useful information for the next Joe who gets one of these great hunks of iron.

Regards,
James

Link to album of acquired grinder:

Reid surface grinder - Google Photos

Third photo down on the right. Looks like a collar on the shaft housing. Is that a belt tightener?

Tom

After reading your posts, it isn't clear whether or not you've been able to manually cause the machine to to feed in as you rotate the input shaft. It sounds like you needed to tighten the belt to prevent it from slipping because it wasn't feeding, and once you do tighten the belt the gearbox blinds up, which tells me you haven't witnessed it feed, and something has stopped up?

If you remove the left hand wheel assembly, and also unthread the drive pinion that engages the rack on the table by rotating the right hand wheel and catching the assembly when it reaches the end of the screw (you'll have to remove a few screws that support the right hand wheel), you'll have freed the gearbox from a number of constraints that may result in the binding lack of feeding; The previous recommendation simply reduces the number of variables here and allows you to isolate the functioning of the gearbox alone.

if you take your machine down to this point, your and my setup will be exactly the same. I encountered quite a bit of resistance to engaging and disengaging different sides of the differential which reverses the feed direction. The way I overcame the sticking was simply bombarding the assembly with wd-40, but only after I superficially cleaned the surrounding areas of any grit or contamination that may have washed into the assembly with the lubricant.

The rocker component on the right hand side of the gearbox is tensioned externally on the outside right hand face by a spring and cap which push the plunger that engages the roller of the flip-flop assembly, which is what I'm calling it. You can remove the plunger tensioning spring cap which will allow you to actuate the reversing lever and also inspect the rotation of the wheel. This is a pretty stout mechanism which is already hard to actuate, and if the plunger is at full spring tension and there's any resistance to actuating because of gunk or buildup, I can imagine that old flat belt will have a really hard time pulling the system hard enough to overcome all the resistance, and this could very likely be the sticking point for you.

In my case, Between rotating the input drive shaft and fiddling around with what looks like an elbow outside of the gearbox to the right, I was able to feel the catches through the rotation of the input drive shaft and more or less manually get the grinder to go through the motions of automatic feeding.

The sequence was confusing at first, but this was only because the gearbox was gummed up and events were not happening consistently enough to identify what to expect and at what point throughout the rotation, but as I lubricated and worked things around it became very evident what that sequence was. at least for the gearbox.

Mine wasn't in that bad of shape in terms of cleanliness, but It was bad enough and I can imagine if the hand wheel assembly part of the automatic feed system was installed (which mine is missing all together) it would have further constrained the system, and I would have had a really hard time freeing the sliding components in the gearbox that sit between the gears of the differential.

You may have already solved your problem, but in any case I'm curious to know the result. So keep us posted!

James