Reply to Thread

This site may earn a commission from merchant affiliate links, including eBay, Amazon, and others.

Message: <blockquote data-quote="BillM" data-source="post: 3984213" data-attributes="member: 45785">Most useful safety info my best/favorite instructor at FTTC machine shop class gave was "keep your left hand in your hip pocket. DO NOT put your hand on the headstock!" Avoids a lot of possible errors that can make you bleed that way. Electricians have a similar maxim. I'm not a electrician either, but have done the work more than once over the past five decades, and dad was a mine electrician for many years. Attached are the photos I took as I was moving it into my shop room. It has a single tumbler gear box, taper attachment, two 5c collet closers, three 5c collets, one terribly rusty, both standard and turret tailstocks, and a spare single tumbler gear box. It sat in a leaky barn for about 5 years. I'd posted in one of the metalworking groups online that I'd learned on a SB lathe in my high school class, and always wanted one, but had never been able to find one I could afford when I found it. My friend, Bill HInkle, texted me and said he thought he might be able to make my dream come true. We were discussing it, and my wife demanded the phone. Told him in no uncertain terms that I was not allowed to buy his lathe. About broke my heart until she said "I want to buy it for him for Christmas." He told me he'd realized that he wasn't going to live long enough to restore it, so sold it to my wife for $950. 4-1/2' bed, 1-3/8" spindle bore, and the spindle adapter for using MT3 tooling. I've got about a third of the smaller parts de-rusted, built a tub to do electrolytic rust removal on the bed, but haven't gotten to put the two items together. Found a "air eraser" at HF a couple of weeks ago, might be able to clean up the bed where it sits now, in the back corner of my shop. I've also got a airgun I rigged from instructions on youtube that will blow sand or whatever, and I've also got a box of 25lbs of walnut hull blasting medium. Would save me having to hoist the thing and suspend it in nearly 100 gallons of mildly caustic solution...Came with the "modern" tubular steel bench stand, missing one drawer and lock. So one of these days I get to learn some more about sheet metal work, too. Not sure if the ways were hardened. Kinda hard to see under all the rust. Figure by the time I get it all cleaned up, I'll know about everything there is to know about this machine. Which was shipped to the Ruritan Arsenal in New Jersey in 1941. I've been several kinds of mechanic, from high-performance fighter jets, to home and industrial laundry machines, and both mainframe and micro-computers, the usual suspects in the automobile world, and satellite, wideband, and radio communications. Anything I don't already know, I figure I can learn. If the bed is as bad as age, use, and rust can make it, I might have to learn how to do scraping, too. Got a couple of small mills, three drill presses, bandsaws, and a Lewis shaper, so I figure I can make anything I need that I can't buy. <img src="/images/smilies/wink.png"  class="smilie" loading="lazy" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)" data-shortname=";)" /> I suppose I could learn to apply turcite if necessary, too. Bill</blockquote>

Verification