New Addition for the Shop :)

Since getting the mill I have been trolling the local Craigslist entries in search of a reasonably sized lathe.  This weekend, I found a used Clausing 6303 12x24 inch machine up in Temecula (~30 minutes north of here). Supposedly this machine had been sitting in a garage for 30 years.

Here it is on the trailer in front of the garage:

 Hmm, That angle looks kind of familiar ,....


Here is a closeup of the headstock showing some of the Grime that still needs to come off:

I was aware that lathes are known for having a lot of the weight up towards the head end, but this seemed like a good angle to show just how much the headstock end weighs:

Here we go, Egyptian style :) The wood skids really helped with the unloading.

 Up on furniture dollies in the shop garage :

It looks like the last thing this lathe was used for was forming and/or polishing thin brass end caps for light fixtures of something like that. I found about half a dozen in the bottom of the machine. In addition, there is a red residue all over the thing. Here is the head stock area before cleaning:

 And Here it is after some scrubbing with Simple Green:

 So, the red stuff does come off fairly easy, unless it's mixed with oil and grease.

Here is some interesting Crud Geology. It looks like the lathe used to be used for making parts( the lower layer of chips) and then used mostly for polishing ( the upper layer of red fuzz). I think the red fuzz is actually residue from those red scotch brite pads.

Layers of Crud

The inside of the rear cover.

Red fuzz is Everywhere !!!!

That red stuff will probably take some time to clean off.
So, remember, if you use up a lot of those red polishing pads, make sure to clean up after you use them, or this could be in your future :)