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Refurbishing a 1941 13"x5' Lathe

MyLilMule

MyLilMule

Hot Rolled
Joined
Jan 5, 2021
Location
Ohio, USA
I recently purchased my first lathe, a 13"x5' from 1941. I bought the refurb kit from eBay and started digging into it.

I decided to video the process. Partly because I can use the video of taking it apart as a guide to putting it back together. :)

Here are the first couple videos of us unloading it off the trailer and rebuilding the tailstock.

Hopefully, none of the mistakes I will be making will be irreversible.


 
I about had a heart attack when I saw you lifting with the strap around the carriage like that. I hope that you didn't crack anything. If you have to lift the entire lathe, just use the webbing between the ways.

Was it in use when you picked it up? If so, then it is probably okay to apply power. If it wasn't (has been in a corner for years), then operating it is a gamble - clogged oil paths, hardened wicks, etc. It sounded like it was making a grinding noise at the end of your video.

Good luck on your rebuild.
 
It was a bit sketchy for sure. Honestly, I hadn't even thought about the webbing in the bed. But the strap was actually underneath the bedway. The carriage was only over that far to try and keep most of the weight under the strap. Poor planning. Nothing was ever jarred or dropped hard.

To say it was in "use" might be a tiny bit of a stretch. It was being used, but sparingly. I had no intention of running it. I already have the compound and cross slide apart, the gear train has been removed and I have started on the gearbox.

Although I am having some difficulties with fully disassembling the gear train. I only have a small 2 ton arbor press and no hydraulic press. One of the gears on the reverser (the one with the longer shaft) is still on the lever, and two of the large gears on the banjo are still on it. I'm debating on if I just run it, or try to figure out how to get them off.

The difficulty I have in deciding to run it is a previous owner decided to lubricate the lathe with grease. It is on everything.
 
can you get a gear puller to the banjo gears? Especially if you can fit some shim strip between the puller jaws and the gear, to spread to the force out. Then heating up the gear with a MAP torch and cooling the shaft (dry ice is good) can reduce the amount of force needed to separate something considerably.

I did that on my spindle/ bull gear/ spindle sheave assembly - stuck it in the oven at 250F for an hour while the wife was out and then jammed a bunch of ice cubes down the spindle when it came out. Came apart with very little force.
 
I tried a simple 2 jaw gear puller to no avail, similar to what was tried here in this thread:

Heavy 10 banjo gear removal?

68817d1359853802-heavy-10-banjo-gear-removal-dcp_2039.jpg


(but without the nut) I couldn't keep it straight and it wanted to lean over, which made it unworkable.
 
mattthemuppet said:
[...] heating up the gear with a MAP torch and cooling the shaft (dry ice is good) can reduce the amount of force needed to separate something considerably.

I did that on my spindle/ bull gear/ spindle sheave assembly - stuck it in the oven at 250F for an hour while the wife was out and then jammed a bunch of ice cubes down the spindle when it came out. Came apart with very little force.
Click to expand...

I should've thought of that when trying to get the little b*****d pinion gear off of my spindle. MN Oxygen isn't too far away... I wonder where a guy can pick up an old liquid nitrogen container for cheap... :scratchchin:
 
I've got one in the lab :) Fun fact about liquid nitrogen is that it'll freeze your nitrile gloves solid just before it starts freezing your fingers. Good warning sign to pay attention to :)

Dry ice will get you most of the way without the transport hassles of liquid nitrogen, lot easier to find too. I used to buy a small chunk of it every so often to recharge our soda stream CO2 bottle.
 
Go with some care. A steel shaft in a cast iron housing will loosen if you heat the entire assembly. Example, spindle inside the bull gear. If you attempt to shrink the steel with LN2 or dry ice you will unavoidably cool the entore assemly. This will make the item with the larger expanision cooeficient (cast iron gear) *tighter*.

In the case above, with the puller, a heat gun for the entire assembly is wise. Be *sure* the shaft is not threaded into the cast iron, where the nut would be a locknut....
 
On the 13" banjos the nut is there simply as a backup for the press fit. It pulls a shoulder in the shaft tight against the banjo. They press out real easy on an arbor press with some brass stock or a really fat pin punch. Just be sure to aim the oil holes upwards when you go to press them back in. And don't do like I did and press them in with the offset in the banjo facing backwards. :D

Good advice on the expansion coefficients. :cool:
No dry ice, but I've got a bunch of co2 fire extinguishers and there's a place downtown that will recharge them for cheap... :scratchchin:
 
I may try some heat on the banjo when I go about this again. I really want to get it all the way apart. Especially after what I went through this past week with the chuck and the apron. Ooof. I'm glad I got this thing "cheap."

img_2963.jpg


img_2981.jpg
 
jim rozen said:
Go with some care. A steel shaft in a cast iron housing will loosen if you heat the entire assembly. Example, spindle inside the bull gear. If you attempt to shrink the steel with LN2 or dry ice you will unavoidably cool the entore assemly. This will make the item with the larger expanision cooeficient (cast iron gear) *tighter*.

In the case above, with the puller, a heat gun for the entire assembly is wise. Be *sure* the shaft is not threaded into the cast iron, where the nut would be a locknut....
Click to expand...

that's very true, but the key is to be really quick. Take your time heating up the assembly, but quickly cool down the inside part and push it apart within a minute or two at most. That's why dry ice and the like is handy, because it's a) really cold and b) you can put it where you want it fairly easily. Same as shrink fits really - you only have a very small window pressing a cold bearing in a hot bore before the housing heats up the bearing.

Another handy tool in the arsenal of stuck stuff is a can of Freeze Off (or compressed air, held upside down). Heat the banjo, freeze the shaft, heat the banjo, freeze the shaft, then one more time and press out. Helps to "work" the joint, in case there's something else (dried gunk, rust etc) in there that's causing problems.
 
YUMMY!

I hope your laundry equipment is in good working order! Might need to take a kerosene bath by the time you finish with that apron. :D

(Don't actually, petroleum distillates are sensitizers.)
 
I have a parts washer that has a 50/50 dilution of purple power. I sat it in that with the pump running over it for the better part of the afternoon. Cleaned up fairly well. And by fairly well, I mean you can handle it and not feel like you just opened a jar of anti-sieze.

I try and keep most of the gunk off my clothes, but my son taught me a trick he learned in the Navy as an aircraft mechanic. Washing your clothes in Deft works really well for the grime and the smell.

Rags go in the garbage.

But today's pain was caused more by the stuck taper pin in the quick change gearbox. Nothing I tried worked. Even tried heat, PB blaster, big hammers, nothing. So I did the only thing I could think of next. I drilled a hole from the big end and used a screw extractor. I was surprised that it actually worked! Now I just need to figure out out how big this was. It was pretty mangled by the time it came out. But fortunately, the holes in the nut and the shaft are 100%.
 
I haven't updated this thread in a while, but I have the lathe back together, but I still have some fine tuning. I've been recording the process on my GoPro and publishing videos on the YooTooobs. I'm way behind on getting them up there, but I'll post links here of the ones I have already made.
 
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