Lathe Painting - Part 3

I was able to make some more progress on the painting these last two weekends.

Rear cover, apron and a couple of handwheels

 I painted the rear cover and the apron outside and worked on the bed and the headstock in the garage.

Bed and Headstock

I checked on removing the headstock from the bed, but the Clausing service manual didn't reccomend it. So I painted the two parts together.

Together again at last :)

After a week of drying, I was able to put the bed back on the base today :) I also got the spindle re-installed with new oil seals.

Old Motor Mount

New and imporved Motor cabinet

 Here is the new motor mount in the now clean base. I will need to do some touch up work on the bottom. the Motor assembly is not easy to wrestle in and I got some gouges in the paint :(

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

Lathe Teardown and Initial Cleanup

I spent the weekend pulling the lathe down to just the headstock and the bed. I did discover a few discouraging things in the aprons though:

Hmm, I think I figured out why the power feed wasn't working....

I am still puzzled how I missed that little fact during my initial inspection... I guess I was happy that the chuck only had 0.003" of run out and that the bed seemed in pretty good shape.

There is also some wear and tear on the inside of the apron, but nothing fatal. I am currently trying to find replacement parts or better yet, a replacement apron assembly. I have a lead on one at Plaza Machinery, but I an still awaiting confirmation.

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:

Mill Vise Fixture Plate

I was inspired by this article on Tom Liptons OxTool blog to make a clamping plate for my mill vise. As Tom points out, this is a great way to hold on to those odd parts that won't really work in the vise but would be easy to hold in the T-Slots, if you just didn't need to take off that darn vise...

Fixture shown clamping a thin part
 

Fixture used as an Angle Plate

Idea for controlling flying chips

I was getting annoyed at having chips flying in my face and across the garage. After a few moments of thinking, I came up with the following setup:

Panels Set up near vise

The front Shield consists of a wood base with a slot for a piece of lexan milled into it. Both the front and the side pieces are attached to the mill table using magnets from old Hard drives. These magnets are used to move the head in and out and are made from high-energy rare earth magnets. This means, that they REALLY stick well. :)

Hdd Magnet mounted to base of front window

HDD Magnet and mounting block for side panel

In use, the front shield keeps chips off of the operator (me) while still allowing me to see the cut. The side walls keep the chips near the machine instead of having them fly all the way across the garage.

Brigeport Mill for the Garage - Part 5 - New DRO scale and alignment

The old Sargon DRO scale was not salvagable, so I ordered a replacement from ...

 Here is the replacement X-Scale installed on the back of the table. I had to drill and tap new mounting holes, since the holes are nowhere near the old Sargon ones. The old scale was not salvagable, so I bought a replacement, which also increased the X resolution from 10 microns to 5.


The image below shows the debris shield installed over the scale

 

Brigeport Mill for the Garage - Part 4 Electrical system installed and cleanup

The electrical system has now been installed and tested on the motor

Control box and Sub-Panel

Interior of control box