My "New" Lathe

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pierredekat

My "New" Lathe

Post by pierredekat »

Well, I finally got my "new" Atlas 10F sorta set up, after deciding on a place to put it and building a bench to put it on.

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As you can see, it needs a little work, but it was hard to pass up at $200. Good lathes at a good price are pretty scarce, here in Houston.

The first big obstacle was wiring up the motor, along with the Forward/Reverse switch. The previous owner trashed the original switch moving the lathe around in his shop, and he took it apart with the intention of fixing it but never got around to it.

So thank God for the internet! I don't know how mankind ever survived without it. I found a replacement Forward/Reverse switch on Ebay, and after much internet research, figured out how to hook the thing up. Wow, it even works.

I had been toying with the notion of converting to variable speed, with the intention of ridding myself of all those crazy pulleys, but by the time I figured on the motor and controller, I had pretty much blown my budget.

Besides, I rather like the pulleys, now that I've played around with them and seen them in action. Now I'm thinking the thing to do would be to spend a day designing and fabricating a nice guard out of sheet metal, painting and installing it, and protecting my fingers that way.

That only leaves me needing about $150 or $200 worth of levers, handles, chucks, and other miscellaneous items to get the thing up-to-snuff.

The one really nice thing is that the previous owner sent the castings off and had new Babbitt bearings poured. They haven't even been bedded in good yet, and that's the next thing on my list of things to do. Well that, and a lot more scrounging around on Ebay.

Makes me wonder when I'm going to find time to make pipes. :lol:
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JHowell
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Post by JHowell »

See, it does happen! Good deal. As for the levers and handles, you can find lots of replacements in McMaster, or you can make them. A friend of mine made replacement T-handles for his Logan, very trick.

I'm very curious to know how this thing indicates after having new bearings poured with the castings off the lathe. Have you put an indicator on the spindle? You want to check at some distance from the spindle, too, but I guess you did say you needed a chuck.

Do you have an approximate age for this lathe? Babbit bearings in the headstock would normally indicate quite an old machine -- my Atlas had bronze bearings. Hard to argue with the price, though, you'll have fun. Nice bench, too, very well done.
pierredekat

Post by pierredekat »

JHowell wrote:See, it does happen! Good deal. As for the levers and handles, you can find lots of replacements in McMaster, or you can make them. A friend of mine made replacement T-handles for his Logan, very trick.
Thanks. Yeah, right now I'm watching 55 items on Ebay, almost all of which are lathe related. :? We'll see how that goes.
I'm very curious to know how this thing indicates after having new bearings poured with the castings off the lathe. Have you put an indicator on the spindle? You want to check at some distance from the spindle, too, but I guess you did say you needed a chuck.
Well, the guy I bought it from had more of a welding-focused fabrication shop, but he was looking to getting into doing more machining stuff for the oil industry down here.

And the story I got was that he had gotten this lathe at an auction and he was in the process of fixing it up, but he only made it so far before he got too busy with the welding/fabrication end.

So when I went to look at it, among the things I checked was how the spindle felt, and it was scary-hard to turn. Well, the guy told me he had sent off for new bearings, and he cracked them open to show me.

And I pretty much believe him. The surfaces on the bearings have what appears to be kindof a slightly, slightly rough "sandcasting" texture on them, with just the faintest hint of shine on the very peaks of the high places.

And there are about .020 worth of shims under each side of the "shell", and if I try to remove any of those shims and tighten things back down, the spindle gets captured pretty doggone snug.

Does that make sense?

So far, I haven't really done much more than just bump the motor a few times at low RPMs, but I am guessing I will have to learn all about bedding Babbitt bearings before I can really run this thing much.
Do you have an approximate age for this lathe? Babbit bearings in the headstock would normally indicate quite an old machine -- my Atlas had bronze bearings. Hard to argue with the price, though, you'll have fun. Nice bench, too, very well done.

Thanks. Yeah, so far, I have only been able to determine that it was made sometime between 1937 when the model was first introduced and 1947 when the model went from a manual-gear-change setup to a "Quick Change" gearbox.
Benton
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babbitt bearings

Post by Benton »

So when I went to look at it, among the things I checked was how the spindle felt, and it was scary-hard to turn. Well, the guy told me he had sent off for new bearings, and he cracked them open to show me.

And I pretty much believe him. The surfaces on the bearings have what appears to be kindof a slightly, slightly rough "sandcasting" texture on them, with just the faintest hint of shine on the very peaks of the high places.

And there are about .020 worth of shims under each side of the "shell", and if I try to remove any of those shims and tighten things back down, the spindle gets captured pretty doggone snug.

Does that make sense?
It looks like you really did get a good deal on that lathe! That is, assuming that the bearings break in without getting too loose.
Our local machine shop has started doing a lot of babbitt work recently. They say that saw mills have gone back to babbitt bearings for the log rollers because you can drop a log on them and they won't crack like a hard steel ball bearing.
If your bearings are still rough you are supposed to finish them by hand before you break them in. Paint the shaft with layout fluid and let it dry, then put the bearing together clean and unlubed. At this point it should be shimmed so that it is tight, but still turnable by hand. Spin the shaft around at very low speed for a while until the layout fluid redistributes itself. Ideally, you should feel the bearing loosen up when this happens, but if its too tight to begin with it will never really get loose.
Take the whole thing apart and look at the bearing surface. The layout fluid should be piled up n the low spots and the high spots should be shiny. Very carefully scrape a little metal off the shiny (high) spots and leave the low spots alone.
Clean off the layout fluid and repeat the process until the low spots almost disappear.
To run in the bearing, you need to set up fairly tight and run it with loads of lube on very low speed. If you did a good job with the scraping, the bearings will loosen up and stop leaking lube fairly quickly. If there are still lots of low spots on the bearing, it will leak like a sieve.
All this comes second-hand from the guys at our local machine shop. I took a shop tour two weeks ago and they were working on a set of bearings, so they have me the Cliffs Notes version of the process.
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JHowell
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Post by JHowell »

'Twere me, I'd ask lots of questions on an Atlas forum. Spindle bearings are pretty special. Babbit bearings in general are poured with the shaft in place, which is especially important with the spindle because it has to be exactly parallel to the ways. In the day, I suppose the bearings could have been poured around a core and then bored for the spindle, but making a bearing that is an exact fit for the shaft without lots of fussy machining is why babbit was used to begin with. The phrase "sent the castings away to have new bearings poured" strikes me as odd, but I know nothing about this lathe. I'll send this thread to a friend who knows all about this kind of thing and see what he says.
pierredekat

Post by pierredekat »

Thanks, Benton. Yeah, that's pretty close to what I have been reading. It's a lot like a type of "inlaying", as near as I can tell so far.

Jack, yeah, I signed up for the atlas_craftsman group on Yahoo the day I bought it. About half the guys who start off with Babbitt bearings really like them, and the other half convert their machines to the later model Timken bearing headstock. If worse comes to worse, I can do the conversion too, for around $100, which isn't totally out of the question. But since I apparently have a nice set of Babbitt bearings to start with, I might as well see what I can do with them.
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JHowell
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Post by JHowell »

OK, here's what Denny replied. I'll just let him have his say, after pointing out that he always calls 'em like he sees 'em, that his perspective is that of a high-tech machine shop owner who makes stuff like electron microscope parts and artificial hips, and that even if he doesn't dig a machine he'll tell you exactly what you need to get it running. And his collection includes at least half a dozen Atlases.

Quote:
Hi Jack

OK first this lathe is 10D not a 10f. The bearings were die cast molded in
place on the head stock not pored on this model. Doing it the way Atlas did
they could maintain alignment. Pouring a bearing in place is not an
option. Sand casting a bearing would require them to be machined after the
fact. There is no way you could get any kind of spindle alignment doing it
this way. When Atlas die cast the bearings into the head stock they did not
care where the bearing bore in the casting was only that there tooling put
the cast bearing bore were it needed to be. Most all of the parts on an
Atlas lathe are just junk as once worn little can be done with them as far
as repair.


End quote.

In the end, I'm sure you'll get lots of use out of the lathe. I made a bunch of stems on an Atlas 6" that was about as worn out as a lathe can be and not fall apart right on the bench. If there really is a tapered roller bearing update that can be done for $100 I'd be tempted, and I'm sure the Atlas forum will have better advice on that. You might as well see what happens with the bearings "running them in." Nothing lost if it doesn't work, and you might get lucky. It's a small chance that the spindle will point straight down the ways, but you never know, and some misalignment could be corrected with shims.

Good luck,
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