1939 Round dial restoration
Greetings all,
Just wanted to post an update and a few easy lessons learned from my restoration of #7158...
The round dial gearbox was fun. I was intending on just cleaning off, flushing, and running without doing what I and we usually do, and ripping it to shreds, repairing and replacing anything awry. Well...
That’s the before and after. If uploading photos wasn’t such a PITA I would post more along the way.
Backtracking a bit, before removing from the lathe, I was having trouble running the gearbox through the range of operation. Sometimes I couldn’t turn the center knob, sometimes I could. Push, pull, didn’t matter. It wasn’t until last nights final assembly, that it dawned upon me...
When I disassembled, the hardened cone on the tumbler lock was tight to the main casting and locked with the lock nut. I played with it and adjusted it a turn or two away, and it works! Problem one solved.
Problem two is the gasket, and through all my digging on PM for info, none was found. There are a few where the thickness of the gasket affects interaction of parts. Here is one instance. Thinnest material I could find is 1/64” and that is over twice the thickness of the original. I tried it and all is great until the final installation of the clutch shifter and feed shifter knobs and their pins. Now they won’t move. So off to cut a new thinner gasket, perhaps from paper. I will follow up with an update if it solves the clearance issue.
The last lesson is to educate yourself about bearings. Most of mine were in halfway decent shape after 80 years, but I replaces all except the three flanged angular contact bearings, which will have a N prefix in the new departure line. They are expensive and hard to find. Mine are serviceable. But the rest are available. I am working on an excel sheet of all the bearings with monarch part numbers, and their new equivalents. I will upload when I have it together, under a new topic so it is easier to search. And it will cover early round dial gearboxes.
JP
Greetings all,
Just wanted to post an update and a few easy lessons learned from my restoration of #7158...
The round dial gearbox was fun. I was intending on just cleaning off, flushing, and running without doing what I and we usually do, and ripping it to shreds, repairing and replacing anything awry. Well...
That’s the before and after. If uploading photos wasn’t such a PITA I would post more along the way.
Backtracking a bit, before removing from the lathe, I was having trouble running the gearbox through the range of operation. Sometimes I couldn’t turn the center knob, sometimes I could. Push, pull, didn’t matter. It wasn’t until last nights final assembly, that it dawned upon me...
When I disassembled, the hardened cone on the tumbler lock was tight to the main casting and locked with the lock nut. I played with it and adjusted it a turn or two away, and it works! Problem one solved.
Problem two is the gasket, and through all my digging on PM for info, none was found. There are a few where the thickness of the gasket affects interaction of parts. Here is one instance. Thinnest material I could find is 1/64” and that is over twice the thickness of the original. I tried it and all is great until the final installation of the clutch shifter and feed shifter knobs and their pins. Now they won’t move. So off to cut a new thinner gasket, perhaps from paper. I will follow up with an update if it solves the clearance issue.
The last lesson is to educate yourself about bearings. Most of mine were in halfway decent shape after 80 years, but I replaces all except the three flanged angular contact bearings, which will have a N prefix in the new departure line. They are expensive and hard to find. Mine are serviceable. But the rest are available. I am working on an excel sheet of all the bearings with monarch part numbers, and their new equivalents. I will upload when I have it together, under a new topic so it is easier to search. And it will cover early round dial gearboxes.
JP
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