Hi all. Its been ages. All sorts of things have been happening and, honestly, I've really been struggling to find any enthusiasm for working on the truck.
That may have changed now. We'll see how I go.
Anyway, I have this little shed out the back that I suspect was once an outside thunderbox and later cot converted to a small chook shed, going by all the boxes screwed to the walls.
I've just been using it to store random stuff in, but decided to clean it out and see what I could do with it.
So I emptied it out, pulled out all the old chook boxes and all the nails and screws that were used to hang things on, and then lined it out with some 7mm ply sheets that I got as seconds. Before putting them up, I painted both sides. Made a huge difference.
The shed is 9' x 6' on the outside. It looks a lot bigger in these pics as I took several shots and joined them to make a single image. It stretches things a bit. By my calculations, it should be big enough to squeeze a decent size lathe in. So I did.
It was coming up to the end of the financial year and the Machinery Warehouse mob usually run some decent package deals around that time every year.
With the discounts they were offering, the package I could afford, along with the extra bits I wanted, was actually a couple of steps up from what I had originally been looking at.
In the end I got the Hafco AL-356V with the digital read-outs, an upgraded tooling set and Jacob's chuck. I also got some decent levelling feet and a magnetic base indicator gauge.
When it got here, I backed it into the yard but there wasn't room to manoeuvre the car and trailer around, but it turned out to be balanced well enough that I could drag it by hand, most of the way.
The last bit was soft dirt and a bit of a slope, so I used the crowbar to creep it forward, into position.
The only issue I had was that when I unboxed it, I found it was facing the opposite direction to what the markings on the crate said.
With a couple of sheets of heavy ply, a high-lift jack and some pipe rollers, we got it out of the trailer and turned around. The lathe weighs 650kg and it was bolted to a thick plywood skid.
We jiggled it around and finally got it into its place. Not a lot of room at the tailstock end, but there's roughly 18" between the end wall and the head end of the lathe.
Since then, a lot of other things got in the way, but I've been watching a lot of YouTube channels and picking up tips and tricks. I've also been spending too much money on useful stuff.
Its surprising just how much these things cost. I now have a full set of outside micrometers, telescopic bore gauges, centre drills, inside/outside callipers and digital vernier gauges.
I've recently picked up an engineer's level, a set of 123 blocks and 20L drum of way oil, which brings me up to now.
I spent half of Friday trying to level this damn thing. I set the 123 blocks on the cross-slide and sat the level on them. I'd then get down on the ground, hold the threaded rod and turn the adjusting nut, then get up and see if anything would change.
The level is accurate to 0.002" over 10", so towards the end, it would only need microscopic movements of the adjusting nut to move it too far. Once I got the head end level, I'd crank the saddle down to the tailstock end and go through the same steps, then wind back to the headstock end and find it had moved slightly, so I'd tweak it a bit. I finally got both ends showing as level and was packing everything up for the day when I noticed a bead of oil that I had sprayed on the cross-slide to prevent rust was creeping along, heading for the back of the lathe. How could it do that? I'd just spent ages levelling it. I put the level back on and it showed as level. On a hunch, I spun the level 180° and saw it was so far out, the bubble was hard over one side and I had to lift the end close to 3mm to get it to come back. I was not happy.
I took it inside and tried making sense of the instructions, but while the words were mostly English, they didn't actually make intelligible sentences. YouTube to the rescue again. After a quick search, I actually found a video from the original manufacturer. One of them, at least. From what I can tell, they are all made in the same factory and then each company sticks their name on them. Anyway, their video shows that you remove the end cap and adjust the two little collars that run on a long threaded rod. You don't actually turn what looks like the external adjusting screw that you see on the outside, which is what the paper instructions seemed to imply. When I popped the end caps off my level, I found that they had never screwed the top collar down, which locks everything into place. The end of the level was free to move up and down about 5 threads on the threaded rod. I then watched another video on adjusting engineer's levels, which shows how you place the level on a flat surface, like my desk, then rotate it until the bubble is centred. Then you block it in place so you have an exact position that you can come back to, which I did by using my 123 blocks. You then flip the level 180° and see how far it is out. You adjust the collar until the bubble is roughly halfway back to the centre, then flip the level and rotate it until it is centred again. You keep repeating this until you get to the point that there is no change in the bubble's position when its flipped. This took me ages, as the house I am in is ancient and everything moves. I had to sit in one exact spot and not move. And I have 2 cats. Ever noticed how if you have to do something that requires concentration, stillness and precise, minuscule movements, that this is also the time that said cats decide that its a great time to wake up and come to see what you are doing? Usually involving lots of jumping around, head-butts, nose-prods and foot-pokes. Eventually though, I got it levelled and locked off.
Today, I went back out to the shed and managed to get the lathe levelled in just 10 minutes. I figured I'd start with something simple. I recently moved stuff around in the laundry and found the main shaft out of the truck winch was leaning up against the wall behind the door. I had a nasty case of surface rust from dust and moisture settling on it over the last couple of years. I figured I would put it in the lathe and spin it up while I wet sanded it clean again.
It looks a lot worse in this pic than it actually is. What I noticed was that, as I tightened up the 3-jaw chuck, the tail-stock end was trying to move off to the side. I tried loosening it off again, rotating the chuck a bit and re tightening it, but it still kept trying to move off centre. I thought it might be the weight of the shaft doing something weird, so I pulled it out and put in a piece of heavy-walled stainless pipe that was 18" long and found it was doing exactly the same thing. I set up the magnetic-base dial indicator and found that right at the chuck, it was showing as 0.3mm out and at the far end, it was 1.6mm out.
That seemed a bit excessive. I have a live centre for the tail-stock, but that much run-out would put a lot of strain on things. I decided that, for now, I would swap over to the 4-jaw chuck and see if it was any better. It took me 15 minutes to get the 3-jaw chuck off as the marks I thought I was lining up were not the ones I was supposed to be lining up.
Once I went and checked the manual, it only took a bit of levering with a pry-bar, smacking with a dead-blow hammer and some additional swearing to get it off. When I tried to put the 4-jaw chuck on, I couldn't turn 4 of the 6 cam-locks that hold it on. Not even a quarter turn. When I checked it out, I found that those 4 studs that the cam-locks gripped were lower than the 2 that worked. After reading the manual, I worked out that I could adjust them by removing a small lock screw and backing the studs out a bit. After checking with the verniers, I found those 4 studs were all shorter by 1 or 2 threads than the 2 that worked. I adjusted them and it went straight on the lathe. Now how does that work? They held up shipping for over a week, as they said they had to assemble the lathe, adjust and test everything before shipping. They even included a sheet with a lot of numbers and ticks, showing how accurate everything was. How did they get great figures on the 4-jaw chuck when there was no way they could have even mounted it? Now I have doubts about everything else they claim to have tested.
I noticed that the jaws were in the chuck, but set up for external clamping of larger pieces. I started winding the first jaw out, to flip it over, but it was really rough and gritty. I got it out and found that the threads and side dovetails were full of old thick oil, metal filings and casting sand. I cleaned the first one out and it now runs fairly smoothly, but I really need to totally dismantle the chucks and clean and lube them up properly. I'll do that tomorrow. Hopefully, the 3-jaw chuck will run a bit truer as well.
I worked out how I will make the metal cups that hold the rubbers for the suspension bushes for the transfer case and I managed to pick up a 2m length of 55mm diameter solid rod (mystery metal), to turn them out of, so they will be my first real projects. The winch shaft will get sanded clean and I will probably need a couple of speedi-sleeves where the cable drum runs as those areas are pitted from sitting. (Before I got it).
Anyway, that will do for now. I'll do up a post when I get the chucks cleaned up and see if I can get some decent pics of the lathe shed.
Greg.
