I'm finally starting the thread for my lathe rebuild. It's going to be a LONG slow process. But I've decided to start.
My lathe, as mentioned above, is made in India. I do not know the history of this lathe, nor its company. It came to me in 2016, I believe, from a CNC shop in Markham, Ontario. The shop manager said he bought it to tinker with but at some point decided to sell. It had it listed for somewhere around $1000. I offered him a heartfelt story and all the money I had at the time, which was $600. He said he was happy to give it to someone who will use it and take care of it and accepted my offer. Elated, I didn't care what the wife said and I drove out to get it.
Etc.
The lathe had some issues and I've fixed them over the years. I did a test down of everything but the head. Cleaned and lubed but did not rebuild anything as I had no idea how.
I've worked with it the best I could over the past 2 years, but I am beginning to become fed up with its wear and misalignment, and it's stiffness in some areas.
I started with making a solid tool post so I could take the compound off and begin with that.
I've ordered some parts already and they're trickling in.
I started with putting a bearing in the hand crank as it was only sliding surfaces previously and it's difficult to tighten the nut and lead screw to eliminate slack and backlash while still being able to turn the crank.
Took me three swings which resulted in needing to push a brass bushing into the hole to fit the bearing because, mostly I'm a goof and miss target measurements, and because i ordered the wrong bearing to fit the lead screw, which resulted in the right bearing being 1mm smaller in diameter than the hole I bored. Yup, that's gonna happen a lot with this project... But it's all together and spins very nicely. It will be a joy to crank that wheel now.
Next issue is the dove tail. I'm not sure why but there is no undercut relief in the dove tail. The outside corner jams against the inside corner of the dove tail resulting in only the angle flat seating, and seating poorly. You can see light in the picture between the flats. There is only about 1/16" of meat that makes contact along the whole length of the non gib side, and I know the gib side is not better. Most of the scraping remains on the dovetail and the flats. I wonder if this compound had been rescraped at some point and someone didn't add another relief cut to the inside corner. The second reason I think that is because the scraping is rather erratic.
To start on the body of the compound, I cleaned up some surfaces and surface ground the face of the swivel. It was .005" convex. Cleaned up very nice.
This allowed me to put the base on the surface plate and start looking at surfaces. The flat mating surfaces slope .006". And the width of dove tails narrows by .0015" from end to end. Measured the best I could with a pair of 1/4" end mills and a 2-3 mic.
I'm not sure what my next step will be. Likely to setup and make the relief cut in the corner of the dove tail and see how the fit is after.