Lathe Painting - Part 2

Today, I was able to put the first coat of paint on the base:

Bottom of Base after first coat

Top of Base after first coat

I choose a light shade of gray than the orginal shown below for two reasons:

1. I wanted to better match the shade of gray on the Bridgeport
2. The lighter color should help maximize whatever lighting I can put up in the garage 

At this point, I think I am going to re-paint the external parts but the internal ones like the back cover and the motor mount plates will stay the original color. I will also leave the tail stock for later, since it's pretty easy to remove once I feel like painting again :)

Samples of original color on back cover and bottom of the bed

In addition to the paining, I also did some more de-griming :

Headstock and bed after some more cleaning

Back Cover with less grime

Motor Mount before

Motor Mount Parts Now

Gear Train before

Gear Train Parts Now

Lathe Motor Replacement

A while back I was fortunate enough to get my hand on a surplus 1.5KW (2 Hp) Brushless Servo Motor from Panasonic. As it turns out, the WJ200 series of VFD drives has firmware features to run a brushless motor in sensorless vector control mode. This means, that the servo can be used without using the encoder.

New Servo Motor vs Old Induction Motor - Half the Size, Twice the power :)

Lathe Progres - Base Cleanup and Painting

The last couple of weeks have mostly been disasembly and prep work. I have finally made some progress on re-finishing the Base:

Getting ready to pressure wash the Grime off