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1939 10EE New to me lathe, a journey.

TBJK

Aluminum
Joined
Mar 26, 2021
I bought a 1939 sundstrand drive 10EE. I had been watching for lathes anywhere within about 500 miles from me(North Dallas). So I found one 425 miles from me. Last weekend I drove with my family to Salina Kansas to pick it up. I paid his full 2700 he was asking. It came with a 3 jaw, 4 jaw & through spindle 5C collet chuck, steady rest, follower rest, BXA tool post & multiple tool holders. The seller help me load it onto my trailer using skates & a winch. Getting is home, we used my neighbors bosses tractor to unload it. We set it on 3/4” cold rolled to roll it into its final position.

The motor is original with a build date of 2-7-1939. The serial numbers of the machine all match with 6830. I have not had a chance yet to order the books/information from Monarch. It appears that the pump has been rebuilt at some point, due to how clean it is.

Today I was finally able to power it up & run it. I made some adjustments to the drive engagement. The top end speed is not making it to the 2500 though. I have looked around & attempted several adjustments to bring that speed up. I’m going to change the hydraulic filter to eliminate that portion as well. I checked the motor speed, its was 1797 or so.

Has anyone else had any luck with the adjustments of the speed? Secondly anyone with the Sundstrand have pulley dimensions I can verify they are correct size? Just trying to check the simple stupid stuff first before getting into the pump.

I do have many things I want to do to this lathe, cleaning up all the paint is one of them. Mainly removing the paint from all the fasteners, oil caps, etc..

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TB

Your lathe looks to be in good shape for being 80 years old.
Great pictures. Is yours the oldest lathe on the forum?
A couple questions, on the main lever that selects forward/reverse there is a knob at the base of the lever, what does it do?
The red dial indicator, is it all there?
I don't see a stem.
Keep posting pictures.

Hal
 
Congratulations on a great snag!!!


The hydrostatic drive converts about 10-20% of the throughput power into waste heat, so the drive motor's tag rating can be knocked down a bit.

Good thing about hydraulics, is they don't short out easily. Bad thing, is that hydraulics contain fluid, and anything containing fluid is plumbing, which means it will leak.

The average many will proclaim that it's money, but the ROOT of All Evil is actually PLUMBING. Dante had it right, Lucifer sits frozen in the very deepest depths of hell, and he's clearly angry there, as the septic system is certainly cracked up and destroyed... so everything above is therefore backed up and leaking down.

Replacing the paint will NOT have any positive impact on the machine's accuracy, unless it's obscuring controls and indicators, or (like mine) totally coated with 50yr-old cosmoline residue which distracts you at every moment of skin or clothing contact. Yours looks really, really nice... I think if it were mine, I'd put it on some nice wooden riser blocks, slip a cookie sheet underneath it, and start cutting metal, see if it drips from anywhere... and smile as it does what it was built to do...
 
TB

Your lathe looks to be in good shape for being 80 years old.
Great pictures. Is yours the oldest lathe on the forum?
A couple questions, on the main lever that selects forward/reverse there is a knob at the base of the lever, what does it do?
The red dial indicator, is it all there?
I don't see a stem.
Keep posting pictures.

Hal

I dont think mine is the oldest, I did a lot of searching on PM over the past few weeks.

As for the knob, it turns the motor on, it has 3 positions. 2 on positions & the center off position. The dial indicator has a very short throw, its an Ames, .0005” indicator. It appears to work but I have not verified the accuracy.


Last night I did do some single point threading, I have to tell you its soo much nicer than using a newer(mid 80’s) 13” Colchester
 
I love the location of the matching hand wheel for speed control. Beautiful look, anyway. Were those easy to bump into?
 
I don't know MUCH about the Sundstrand 10EE's, so could easily be wrong, but....

.. "as far as I THOUGHT I knew" they were all flat-belt main drive machines?
...
Both the 1939 patent and the 1939 10EE brochure show dual V-belts. I can't find a single example of a Sundstrand drive machine with a flat belt in my photo archive. That doesn't mean that they don't exist . . .

Cal
 
Never mid the Colchy!

Single-pointing practically right off the deck of the inbound transport tells us you are a well BLESSED SOB!

:D

Better plan a DRO install or such.

A 10EE as don't need a major rebuild or sorting-out of drive is so smooth it might bore you to death for lack of needy-greedy TLC!

I actually have one on it. So far my kids have gotten more use of it than me. It has 5 or 6 decimals, they were challenging each other to get back to 0.
 
Any photos of the tool compartment? Does it have a 5C collet rack? If so, how many layers (we have seen 1 and 2, the 2nd holding 64ths)?

Nice machine. The original 39-40 clam shell indicators are quite rare.

While threading, did you leave it engaged and just stop then reverse the spindle? I find that works quite well on the Sundstrand drive, so the half nuts stay engaged.

Congratulations!
 
That's a fine example of the earliest version of the 10EE, TBJK, looks all intact and functioning. Thank you for the excellent photographs. It'll be interesting to hear what Monarch can tell you about its original owner.

According to the Monarch Machine Tool Co. history by John Legge which can be accessed via a "sticky" at the top of the Antiques and History forum the first 10EE was serial number 6156. That doesn't mean yours is the 675th 10EE built; Monarch used the same serial number series for all their lathe models.

According to some 10EE histories I've seen, one example here: History of the 10ee - Gospel according to Monarch, the Sundstrand drive was replaced with the motor-generator- set/modified Ward-Leonard drive in 1941. I've never seen an explanation for this change after the first two years of production. I doubt there is anyone still with us who has first hand knowledge about this.

David
 
I have read a lot on the 10EE & damn near anything I can find on the sundstrand.

Here is the picture of the collet holder(I hope). It does appear that some of the holes are larger than the others.

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Also forgot to mention, I did use the half nuts for threading, disengaging when I got to the end.
 
Congratulations on a great snag!!!

...The average many will proclaim that it's money, but the ROOT of All Evil is actually PLUMBING. Dante had it right, Lucifer sits frozen in the very deepest depths of hell, and he's clearly angry there, as the septic system is certainly cracked up and destroyed... so everything above is therefore backed up and leaking down....

Amen, brother! Sing it!
 
Sunday I cleaned up the 710 cap on the spindle & gearbox.


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:D
I also cleaned up the work light as it had probably 6 layers of paint on it or more. Not sure if its original or not. I cleaned most of the paint off then put it through the Vapor Hone.
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Many thanks to Russ for the Sundstrand information. I’m going to be going though the Sundstrand getting it to go full range of RPM’s. I’m going to pull the drive assembly out of the machine to do so. I will be sticking to the KISS analogy but documenting the process. There isn’t a lot of information on these, I intend on changing that.

To give you guys a bit of my background, I fix stuff for a living. I work for a major HVAC manufacturer, I work on heavy commercial- industrial HVAC. Anywhere from 15 ton chiller to the largest we manufacturer 8500 tons.

I’m also not afraid to get into more complex things. I have successfully rebuilt multiple transmissions on my kitchen table. TH200, TH350, 700R4, TH180, PX4B & 4R100
 
Looks like my Sundstrand drive was replaced with a more modern one. This appeared to have been done when it was still owned by Coleman. Not sure when yet when it was made. Is a model 15 drive, which there seems to be a lot more documentation on.
I did change the filter, which had its challenges in finding. I also changed the fluid. The old fluid look like egg yolk/orange juice in color.
 
Looks like my Sundstrand drive was replaced with a more modern one. This appeared to have been done when it was still owned by Coleman. Not sure when yet when it was made. Is a model 15 drive, which there seems to be a lot more documentation on.
I did change the filter, which had its challenges in finding. I also changed the fluid. The old fluid look like egg yolk/orange juice in color.

Pictures of the data plate, please. Is this a drive that is still being made?
 
Took a while with the side needs to tend to, but it's only 2020 that thread ended - and with we chickn's understanding you were back up and making chips with it.

Was that the case, and if so, how has it performed for you since then?

Well unfortunately I had to sell it last summer as I was losing the space I was renting.
I did contact the new owner and he’s been using it with favorable satisfaction. He uses it almost every day. Top speed capped out around 1800rpm which is all I got out of it when I completed the rebuild. I was really stoked when I finally got it working but bummed I had to sell it. Funny thing is I was re powering a White MTD garden tractor at the time and was wondering sbout turf equipment hydraulic pump options but didn’t pursue.
 
Ive been kinda chugging away at it. I wanted to keep the original 1939 3hp/ 3Ph motor. However, to get the RPM I want, I messed around with changing the pulleys to get said RPM. I could not get the speed I wanted without over amping the motor. I could have spent more time & probably thrown another Spare 3 hp motor on it. I would have had to probably drive the frequency to about 120 hz.

To be clear, I just want to get my spindle speed back up to the stock 2500 max. When they put this Sundstrand retrofit on, they didn’t to the “best” job doing it. Certainly not the way I would have done it, but hey I’m dealing with what I have without having to change a shit ton of stuff. I bought a single phase 5hp Baldor motor to drive it. I certainly didn’t want to do that, but I just want to get it running & get my garage back in relative order. I probably could have waited around to get another 3 phase motor & transformer. I happen to be fortunate that I tend to come across that stuff from time to time. At work I deal with typically motors & drives that are 350hp to 2500hp.

I’ll post some pics tomorrow
 
Finally been able to find time to pu up some pictures & more details. I got things cleaned up for the most part. I got the spindle up to my 2500 rpm range I wanted which is great. I still need to kinda work with some of the finer adjustments of the speed/neutral postion. Also I’m going to have to come up with some sort of actuator to release the tension on the belts from the hydraulic motor to the spindle pulley. Even in the Neutral position, it’s difficult to turn the spindle by hand to either put a new chuck on or say dial in a 4 jaw. I took out the original starter, made a back plate to mount all my controls to. I’m not throwing the old one away either. I went with an oversized Eaton contactor, also I decided to make the start controls low voltage to make it slightly safer. I chose a transformer with a built in circuit breaker should something happen in the starting switch, I dont have to worry about changing a fuse or replace it a transformer. I put all new SO cords & twist lock plugs on them.

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Looks like you can only post 5 pictures per post. So on to the next one.
 
You need to change the file extension form ".jpeg" to ".jpg" before you upload them. If you're using Windows, you can use File Explorer to edit the file name and change the extension.

Cal
 








 
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