Hi Eric,
I take it you haven't been up to date on that then. The whole thing was
just beat to hell, many parts simply worn out,
heavily misaligned, or outright broke. It "funtioned", but could not make
anything even remotely accurate. Some of it
just unsafe.
Not trying to shoot you down at all man, please forgive me- it's a decent
lathe you donated, when all is fixed and working properly.
This kind of wear is somewhat normal for a lathe of this quality and
age. Most of the moving parts with handwheels are heavily worn,
worn out, or broke. Handwheel holes well past worn out, handles flop around
a lot. Tailstock vertically misaligned with headstock
something close to 15 thousandths- you'll never use the tailstock for
anything like that, drilling with it that misaligned, not sideways
(that is adjustable), but vertically (probably wasn't the original that
came with the lathe, so it's mismatched) without fixing it with shims
makes drilling actually dangerous. Joachim has made castings to replace one
of the broken parts, the crossslide gear assembly.
That part was broken in 4 or 5 places, and held together with wire and
grease (to be fair, though, it was designed poorly from the
factory for that part- it seems they often break on this lathe make).
I have totally disassembled and cleaned the tailstock, and fixed it's ram
lock, having machined a new locking element. Near the end,
after we have all of it, spindle and all, cleaned, lubed, and everything
worn out bushed and safely secured and aligned, bed stoned, etc-
I will buy a morse reamer and reream tailstock cone in line with spindle,
and we'll have a taper cleaner to keep it in good shape.
The taper cone is pretty galled up right now, from people using dinged up
morse tooling in it, possibly with chips in the cone too.
My goal is to get the thing accurate, repeatable, and safe to use again.
I'd like to hope holding tolerances in work of +/-0.005"
should be possible when we are done, if we're lucky. There's a lot of stuff
worn. Tons of backlash and play in the crossslide leadscrews.
I'm looking at making or buying new screws and nuts for it, or adjusting
what we have if possible.
A ton of work actually, but when we are finished- we will have a major,
serious piece of equipment for the shop working well.
Honestly, it's the only serious piece of equipment the shop seems to have
that is in such shape, everything else seems quite
workable.
And I was wondering who it was that did donate it- I see. Thank you,
seriously, for donating a real lathe to the shop. It's not junk, but as is,
it does need about 60 years worth of maintainance for wear.. We'll make
this thing work well again. You donated a lot of parts too!
-Andrew
On Tue, Feb 9, 2016 at 4:38 PM, j. eric townsend <jet@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On 2/9/16 16:26, Andrew C. wrote:
To anyone interested-
I plan to be at the shop for most of the weekend, fixing the atlas lathe.
What's broken? I donated that lathe and all the parts I had for it at the
time, but I can dig around for a manual or parts layout if you need one.
--
J. Eric Townsend
<http://www.flatline.net>
HF: KG6ZVQ
PGP: 0x335E5548 / 75DB 5C22 FD5D F33E B1FA D5BA B429 EA93 335E 5548
