Cleaning/Flushing a headstock

Pulled the top cover off my Pacemaker to inspect all the stuff, and it's got a lot of debris in the all the usual nooks and crannies. Am I crazy for thinking about splashing some K1 through it?

While I'm there I'm going to clean out all the passages the best I can.

Thoughts?

Programmed via Mazatrol

It's a good idea. A lot of machine manuals even tell you how to do this flush. For example drain the oil, replace with petroleum or kerosine or paraffin, run the gears at low speed/no load for a few minutes, drain and refill with oil. Personally I prefer to drain, remove as much muck, goo, debris as possible by hand, wipe off with rags, then do the flush/drain/replace oil routine.

ballen said:

It's a good idea. A lot of machine manuals even tell you how to do this flush. For example drain the oil, replace with petroleum or kerosine or paraffin, run the gears at low speed/no load for a few minutes, drain and refill with oil. Personally I prefer to drain, remove as much muck, goo, debris as possible by hand, wipe off with rags, then do the flush/drain/replace oil routine.

Click to expand...

Perfect, thank you!

Programmed via Mazatrol

I did my lathe , a couple well placed magnets in the headstock can help. My lathe (completely different) feedgear box is gravity feed from the headstock , so input magnets near the oil passages and near the headstock oil pick up
Make sure they can not move and block anything or get fetched up in gears


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk Pro

Cole2534 said:

Pulled the top cover off my Pacemaker to inspect all the stuff, and it's got a lot of debris in the all the usual nooks and crannies. Am I crazy for thinking about splashing some K1 through it?

While I'm there I'm going to clean out all the passages the best I can.

Thoughts?

Programmed via Mazatrol

Click to expand...

Hello. I have a 1941 16x54 American Pacemaker. I flushed my headstock by using a 110v pump, clear plastic tubing and a 5-gallon pail. I think I’ve seen a pump like what I used in Harbor Freight. I used a mixture of kerosene and new headstock oil which the pump picks up. On the discharge side of the pump there is a canister type hydraulic filter somewhere around 10 microns. For the return, screw in a hose barb on the headstock drain and run a hose to your pail.

You’ll need a long plastic hose with a butterfly valve and a long piece of copper tubing for the wand. You can reach about anywhere with it. The first place you’ll want to start is in the back where the clutch and brake are. There is always quite a bit crud there, and if you don’t get it cleaned up first it will just dirty up everything else. I replaced the clutch and brake before I flushed the machine.

I didn’t flush the spindle bearings themselves. My opinion is if you aren’t having problems with the bearings then I would let sleeping dogs lie. I plugged the little oil passages to the spindle bearings when I did the flush. If I were to flush the bearings while the machine was running, I would consider backing off on the spindle bearings' preload a little. It would take a some pressure off pf the bearings since you are using a thinned flush mixture. The Pacemaker's bearings as I'm sure you've noticed are adjustable from the outside. But even this entails some risk.

The Pacemaker doesn’t hold a whole lot of oil so you can change it several times after you put it back in service. Most anything that is going to come out will come out by then.

When you’re done flushing, you can use a long fingered pick-up tool holding paper towels to mop up the excess in the bottom.

Good luck!