well, she's put down in my garage. Not quite on the ground, but as close to it as it well ever be in my possession.
I started by washing it. I think i did 3.5 cycles of purple power and pressure wash, basically until i stopped seeing any progress. It is by no means clean, but it's a start. Ironically, the dirtiest part, the chippan, is almost clean enough to paint as is, if i wanted to. It has some old, dried up cutting oil that was reactivated by the water, so i'll have to deal with that. The purple power i used was essential. No carbon came off without it basically. With it, some things cleaned up in one pass. I forgot to grab dad's venturi sprayer, so i borrowed my roommate's hvlp gun. That of course meant that it was very aerosolized, and my respirators were at dad's, so i wore an old israeli gas mask lol. Hopefully i don't have mesothelioma now...
after washing, it was quite clearly green, and the paint is good. I don't like the color, but i won't be repainting it. Other than some areas where the bondo is chipped out and a few normal scratches, it's fine. Very well adhered, i didn't blow any off washing it. So that is a huge time saver.
Moving it in was actually pretty easy. A big component of that is that @fjsapper came over and lent me a hand, chain, etc. We popped it up with my floor jack, stuffed a ton of 3/4" plumbing pipes under it, and cranked it down with a comealong, anchoring to the trailer and some posts in my garage. Went according to plan and there wasn't any iffy moments really. I am very happy with the move overall. A lot of machines get dropped or damaged. The only damage sustained in the entire move is some small sheetmetal bends when it was being dragged by a forklift (before we removed the sheetmetal), and some etched aluminum from the cleaning process. The former i can straighten in five minutes with an adjustable wrench, the latter can be polished right out. The guys at work were really good to work with, they we're careful and respected my knowledge on moving machines, which i much appreciate them for. So that's a big win already.
So here's some photos. The lighting is poor and it's just cell cam. I'm too tired to take some proper photos today. All in due time.
so here's what i've learned:
- the ballscrew doesn't look worn. It definitely does not turn, and isn't supposed to. That's a new one on me.
- feeds won't stay engaged. I might be missing a handle on the left side of the apron. The ikegai maybe slightly different, and i don't have great photos. There is definitely some issues in there. I will have to do a full strip of the apron and saddle anyway to fix the oiling, so eh, nothing unexpected.
- the one shot oiler even oils the taper attachment. Holy shite. They were serious about wear reduction. 8 wipers on the saddle. 4 on the tailstock. I prefer an oil pump, but oneshots aren't bad if they are pulled frequently. The graphite jams up oil ports so bad that even if they work one day, they might not the next. It's all gonna have to be blasted out.
- i need 12 new belts.
- a $140 trailer is a damn good investment.
speaking of feeds, look at this impressive arrangement:
an incredible range of feeds. From 0.0015" to 0.5"!? 0.022 to 0.031 for normal turning operations which is all i ever normally do. And note the interesting method they use to achieve them. The extended feed ranges somehow use the inherent reduction in the spindle to amplify the gear ratios. So the finest feeds use the highest range, and the coarsest feeds use the low range. That's brilliant.
English threads look fine except for 11.5, 13, and 27. I don't have change gears. Bummer since having a t/a and big bore is well suited for pipe work. I'll find or make the gears i need though if it comes to that. One is a phenolic gear, which i bet quiets the system a lot. It threads english down to an incredibly coarse 9/16th tpi. Metric threads seem to have a good range except 0.8. That's pretty small though. I can't envision cutting an m3 fastener on it. So yeah, feeds are much simpler now than they seemed before.