Logan 11" Lathe Purchase & Paint

So I was in the market for a 10" lathe and I find this Logan 11" lathe that's about a 30 minute drive down a dirt road from nowhere. I can't identify the lathe because its QC gearbox says "1915" and it's got a 55" bedway. It has V-belts but its bedway says Serial Number 665:


Maybe Scott can comment on that and tell me where the heck this thing is from.

It also came with a turret and a regular tailstock. Gosh how I wish it had a steel cabinet, but oh well, you can't have everything.

I'm there with a minivan and I'm like, "How am I going to load this thing? I need to disassemble it." And the seller is immediately like, "No way! I can load that thing for you in a heartbeat."

So he lifts two legs into the bucket of a John Deere and uses this thing that he calls a "come-along" to cinch it down to the front:



I'm like, "I can't believe this guy is going to drive down the road with this thing cantilevered off the tractor like that."

He gets it outside:


and brings over ANOTHER John Deere to lift the lathe. This one had a ball hitch attached to the front of the bucket:



So he drives that tractor down the road:


And he puts the thing in my minivan.

Not able to let well enough alone, I decide to strip and paint it. I can't stand the sea foam green color.

My painting endeavor - next post to come.

wow that looks crazy nice find it looks very good got to love those Logans cant wait to see it painted

Stripping the lathe

I've used Aircraft Remover in the past and it seemed really bad on my lungs, so I opted for Citristrip from Home Depot. My house, being near the ocean, has an outside door on the lower level that leads to a "shower room," good for taking off your wetsuit after a surf. I turned the shower room into a paint booth.



The Citristrip works ok and makes the existing paint bubble like this:


The green paint came off really easily with 1 or 2 coats of Citristrip, however the gray primer underneath was a different story. That stuff turned to putty-like booger goo and gummed up my brass wire brush. It's difficult to get off (see below):


After stripping some pieces, I taped plastic on the walls and went back to Home Depot for some all-thread pieces and a 360 degree swivel hanger thing. I created this item here to suspend my chip tray so that I could paint all sides of it without touching it.


After sanding, I put a diluted phosphoric acid "Prep & Etch" solution on the bare metal to eat away any remaining rusting/pitting. After that, I used a de-waxer de-greaser to clean the piece. Then I hit it with a self-etching spray can primer:


After that, I mixed the Dupont Imron paint (color Bekins Gray) with hardener and used an HVLP gun to paint the chip tray:


Unfortunately, I put too much paint through the gun and on such a hot day got a lot of runs. Right now I'd say my paint job looks like crap, but I plan to fix that up in a day or two:

This picture actually makes it look more purple than it is. It's more of a normal blue-gray. More to come...

That does'nt look like it was anywhere near Hermosa.
I'm still wonderin how he loaded that hangin from the bucket into a minivan, and then how you unloaded it .
How much does it weigh ? Hard to tell how big it is from the pics.

The Logan is a pretty light lathe probably in the range of 1000 lbs.
My 11" works well but gets a little skittish on real heavy cuts.
I also did a teardown and repaint.

I'm surprised the legs didn't break off lifting it that way.

Love those Logans. Have had three over the years. Just gave two away to make room for new equipment.

Man....I hate to see any machine spindle being used as a lift point.

Athack

As I looked through the picture series, I had this morbid sense of upcoming disaster. Every successive picture with a tractor involved just kept getting worse.... Glad you got the lathe home, but like athack commented, using the spindle as a lifting point is not best practice. Keep us posted on progress --

Oh, that's just a metal wire going *near* the spindle and down underneath the bed. Yeah, using a spindle like that would've been bad. I assume it would've broken had someone lifted it that way...

I don't know that you could hurt the spindle. They are rated for way more pressure than the weight of a lathe. I have lifted several that way, but it's certainly not my first choice.