Recommissioning a really big lathe !

Posted by Forrest Addy on the wwwmachineshop board

Picture a lathe bigger than a 40 ft container but a little shorter. Now visualise with a 10 ft faceplate with portable jaws mounted on it.

Now picture a big guy with beard and long hair in PayDay square back overalls climbing around on this big lathe dragging a tool bag with some really big wrenches, a 2 quart oil can, a buncha rags, a 12" file and a bench stone. He also has a skinny apprentice packing a 5 gal bucket of kerosene with a long handle toilet brush sticking out of it. They'll both be climbing around on it cleaning, dressing, tweaking, and adjusting.

They guy is happy but if you ask him he'll cuss previous generations who let a fine old machine slide downhill. The apprentice is merely patient waiting for the time he can get away from the blowhard back to his own machine where I stole him (Come with me kid. Here. Carry this. Fetch me... Scrub that. Clean out that pit.)

Paul White, his favorite electrician, will be monkeying with the electrical system. Dressing contacts, blowing down grids, rolling the motors by hand to clean the comms.

When all is ready, Paul closes the disconnect. I start the oil pump and verify oil delivery every wheare it needs to go. I grab the spindle control handwheel big as a truck steering wheel and give it a part of a turn to the right. The 25 HP motor starts without fuss and the chuck slowly turns. The motor responds smoothly to the handwheel.

I muscle the head stock shift levers (there's only 4 speeds) and engage the apron feeds. I jog the apron power traverses.

Ahh! Everthing on the old monster works.

Great story! It's always a large charge to get an old machine moving again and interesting but frustrating to see the results of the last guy's lack of knowledge, cheapness, or need to patch it together to run one more job.

Cool! I just had a 16CW moved into my 2 car garage shop. The forklift could not get in the garage, but was able to drop the head on the concrete and lift from the tail and shove/slide it the rest of the way in.

When he left I thought, guess that is where it is going to be, too heavy to move. But then I jacked up the leg screws a bit and got out my trusty crowbar. 1/2" by 1/2" we moved it into the corner.

Just a 10hp 3ph idler to start, couldn't wait for the rest of the electrical to make it a full RPC. But the 7.5 hp comes to life, I went through all the gears, and feeds, ah, what a day!

Do you think any of these guys fish?
Sounds like tall tale fish stories to me.

Now if I had a scanner and knew how to post pictures I've got several pictures in a book of a very old Craven, 4 separate castings, steps up to the back of the tail stock. Centre is adjusted with a ship's wheel through a reduction box. 4 bedways 2 cross slides and steps to get up on to the cross-slide from where the machine is operated. A 4 jaw more than 13' diameter and a weight of 250 tons.

Craven on Ebay a few weeks back. In sections, sitting in the weeds.

John

We had a relatively new Craven sell locally about 2 years ago by the railway estimated 20 tons (bring your own crane and low loader).
Meant for machining wheel assemblies/ tyres.

The 4 jaw chuck looked a lot like a faceplate with the jaws bolted on, about 6' diameter. the "V" bedways were about 4" apart. The bed was only 3-4 metres long. Sold for $6K. what a bargain!

Incidentally, I've got a number of special HSS lathe tools for profiling railway tyres. The railwaysused to have some machines which would reface tyres on either side of the assembly simultaneously. I'm thinking if I can find someone with a waterjet they could be cut up into more useable pieces. A number of these special lathes were scrapped but one was saved and is in a nearby railway historical society facility.

Damien...there is a local railway axle reconditioning facility that still uses this type of machine. My company does some repair work (machining) for them. They use a CNC model now, of course, but it turns both wheels simultaneously, whilst they are mounted to the axles. Nowadays it is carbide tooling of course, however. How do they rcondition the railway axles and wheels there now, if they have scrapped all the lathes that do the work? Or do you mean they have only scrapped the older machines from the HSS era.

Wyz,
I can't really illuminate you except the vile stench of corporatisation has permeated the state railways burocrasy?

Where they had the auction and sold the Craven was adjacent to a very large new maintenance workshop for diesel electric locomotives. The building was constructed to provide excellent facilities to attract private contractors onto the site. I don't remember any large workshop for machine tools there, just row after row of work pits to get under the locos.

It's not an area accessible to auction attendees. Although I know the layout because I had been in there several times delivering stuff.

To clarify I said tyres not wheels. Would it surprise you to know that steel tyres are shrunk on the wheels and are replaced or remachined as necessary to reproduce the profile?

In the early days the Ipswich Railway workshops had their own power house to generate electricity, a huge casting and heavy machining capacity and their own gauges and toolmaking workshop. They had a lot of their own threads for which they made chaser sets. I've got some.

This new facility is on another site and the old Ipswich Railway Workshops is now a museum.

They still have tours which include viewing some old steam locos and royal carriages and the workshops where demonstrations are given of blacksmithing activity including the operation of some large drop hammers.

The original Railway workshops had a considerable role in outside general industry. They had the special capacities not available privately. They could do large castings and machining beyond most private companies.