How to leveling a Lathe

okay guys welcome back to build something cool today we're going to talk about aligning and leveling a lathe now that's actually two different things some people get them mixed up because some weights can be aligned but can't be leveled other lathes can be leveled but they can't be aligned I know it sounds confusing but I'm gonna help clarify that when we got a great late to work on today this is at a weird Italian lathe I picked up here in San Francisco and what I like about this slave is it has all the functionality of what moath most lays have for linemen so I can level the feet I can twist the bed but one of the things a lot of people don't talk about is a gear head and a gear head a lot of them can be realigned this way in their orientation to the bed if you have a belt-driven lathe those can't be aligned because of the belt system interfering with the bed but this lathe is gonna allow us to cover a lot of things now I did a video back o when I lived in Idaho so on how to level lathe without using levels I actually used a plumb bob I'll put a link to it so you guys can see what I look like seven years ago for one and just a different process cuz you don't have to have these really nice levels to do that now first of all before you can level your lathe you do have to clean it you want to come through you want to vacuum it up you want to get rid of all the dust and then you want to take precision ground flat stones go over all the ways want to make sure there's no high spots or any dings that have been kicked out one of the things I did for this video is I've taken the compound off because I really don't need the compound something else you gotta be aware of if there's any high spots here it's gonna throw you off so you have to stone this make sure it's flat I checked it measured it I was in a ten thousand seven inch so that's just fine and I want to show you different ways to align it and also level it and why even though they both use levels they're two different techniques so a lathe is a very precise machine and we need to get it alignment we need to make sure that there's no twists in the bed and that's what we're doing by lining the bed but we can also level it and there's kind of a catch-22 there you can get it level but you can't necessarily get in alignment and but some machines you can get level but it'll never be in alignment or I should say that it's always in alignment even after you level no matter what so let me explain that so if you take like a Harding's lathe some of them the head and the tail stock they're actually on three points where most lays are on four maybe six maybe eight this one here actually has six points that the bed sits on so I can twist it and level it but like on hard Ange and also some South Bend lathes the head sits on two points and the tail sits on a third point so it's a tripod like on a South Bend lathe one of the things I was told is it was set up to be put on ships because the deck of a ship is always twisting and moving so by having it on a third point it keeps everything what do I want to say stable there's two reasons I consider leveling lathe one is if you're running a flood coolant that it goes in the right direction the other reason you level it to make sure it hasn't been bumped or moved and that's kind of one of the things I like to be able do is check my lathe periodically to make sure that everything is right from what it was originally so I've got two different levels here one will drive you crazy one will just drive you a little crazy a stair at ninety eight is accurate to a thousandth of an inch every 12 inches so what that means is every mark you see here is a thousandth of an inch so this means this is up a thousand seven inch over twelve inches this is a great level for aligning machines then you get into like this polish one here where every one of those lines as a half a thousandth this thing will drive you crazy so I don't suggest using this one something else you want to check on your levels is it flat and one way you can do that is you just shift it from one side and see where the bubble stops move it to the other side and if it stops in the same point it's good if it's concave door convex it won't give you an accurate reading now don't freak out if it's not level you can actually just simply put a mark right here and every time you put it down you just line it up to the same mark these bubbles are not always the same length and the lengths actually change due to the temperature of your shop one thing you have to remember everything needs to be at the same temperature so let's say you're trying to level this lathe in the winter but you keep your metrology tools in a nice warm shop this is not acclimated to this environment so for you level you want to make sure that you get your level out put it on your lathe allow that heat or temperature changes to equalize so when you work together with them you're not having a problem because this is what will happen is the level is warming the lathe is cold and I just start to go to work I'm gonna end up fighting the level because the level is going to be cooling down it's gonna be changing its shape during this whole process I'm going to be going back and forth back and forth and I'm not going to understand why it's not leveling well it's because the level is actually trying to acclimate to the new temperature but you do want to use as accurate a level as you own now something else I want to talk about before I get too far into leveling feet I want to talk about the proper height for a lathe and I want to talk about it in the terms of what I like a lot of lays are really low for me the right height of a lathe is this handle at the bottom because it's the handle I use the most I want to have just a slight bend in my elbow when I turn it I don't want it to be where I have to bend over I don't have to be where I'm standing up here and trying to use it the right height for me is just right there so let me take you down to the leveling feet and let's talk about that process next we're down here looking at the leveling feet and you'll notice there's actually six leveling feet has four on the head two on the tailstock end so we're going to level on these two here and the two on the back and then we're going to bring up these at the headstock now there is kind of a controversy as how high do we bring those up and that's the question because if we bring it up does it take the bed and Bend the bed up or bend the bed down or does it actually nod the head and I think it really depends on the type of machine you have so this one here has a gap bed in it therefore the casting is here is a lot thinner so if you're going to raise that up technically the head is going to nod but this machine is so rigid because of the chip tray and also the bed being put together this way there's actually almost no flex in this entire system no we're going to try to test this we're going to see what happens it because if I can nod the head what makes that great is I can also take a shaft when it's coming out of here and nod that and get it so it is coplanar with these V ways here's a test I've been wanting to do for a long time so we've got the six adjusting feet and we've got and we're only sitting on four so what happens will we raise up the sixth and really twist this so this is set up to test to see how much Bo happens in the bed now this is not a super accurate test but what it's going to do is give me an idea we've got a test bar here piece of alumina it's probably about four feet long and it's setting on two points and then in the center here we have a gauge now this gauge is set up I think that is point zero zero zero zero five so it's 20 millionth of an inch if I get that correctly so what that means if you take a 1 millionth of an inch and stack it 20 times that's what each one of the marks on this indicator is so it's a very refined indicator if we come over we can see the 10 and the 20 so that 10 is actually about a thousandth of an inch and I do now I've got the feet totally retracted now I'm going to change them I'm going to raise them up and take all the pressure off these two and put all on the back and see if we get some sort of change in this system there's hardly any deviation in this so might set up like I said isn't super rigid but at least it's given me a ballpark to see what's happening okay we're now set up for the next experiment we're gonna try to find out if this head is nodding when we adjust the leveling feet so what we're really trying to do here is we've got a test bar out here it goes out about eight inches and what we're trying to do is figure out there's a change in the distance from the bed to here I'll have my dial indicator set up to kind of measure that now this again is an exact but it's close enough we're really just trying to do an experiment see what's happening is the bed flexing or is the head nodding okay it looks like we've got some deviation here we've got about 9,000 students where we're at here so definitely the head nods quite a bit when doing this let's talk about the alignment this one here is a great candidate for showing you different leveling techniques because it sits on six different leveling feet most of them sit on four some of them actually sit on eight really long ones will actually have a foot in the middle of the bed where you end up putting your levels is going to be critical and so I have these one two three blocks set up on the flats and I put the level here well if there's we're here we're gonna have a problem and there's usually more where at the headstock than there at those tailstock so when you're leveling it it's actually not going to be level and you're going to get frustrated so a better way to do it if you can bring it over to this area here and now when we move it and if I level it here and there's wear in it I'm gonna be able to see it and it's gonna be able to detect it for you now some you don't have a flat surface to put a level on here and you'll never work or will it what you can do is you can actually take blocks and put it right on top of your ways here set your level there and you can level it that way to get the other side well you'll have to move the carriage and reveal the ways on the back to do that so that's one technique now I'm lucky that I'm going to set this up to where I'm consistent here I can also turn my level at this point and also check for level and all I'm after is a consistent area where that bubble is you can check it over here now remember if there's any debris under here you're gonna get a false reading very consistent let me take it to the other end okay we're dead-on consistent so if this level was off what I would do is I would go in and then keep adjusting the feet now this one actually set up really well but keep going in tweaking the feet now remember when I raise up the back we we might add a little twist to it so then we have to figure out well is this level so we'll level this part of the bed then we'll level this part we'll check it how is it this way then we keep working it and it's just kind of a trial and error each time you go back to the leveling feet you're moving it just a little bit less a little bit less now if you can also set up your wrenches to where you can just kind of kick them with your foot slide it over you'll find out it's a lot easier to do it that way now we're going to put a test piece in here and talk about how do we test that we have the bed in alignment it's now time to talk about aligning the head some of you are gonna be able to do what I'm gonna be able to do and some are a gear head usually separate from the bed where if you have an older lathe and where the head is actually sitting on the ways you actually just sit by changing the height of the feet now not all gear heads can be adjusted like this here this is a mock-up of what I have here and this actually has a pivoting pin to where when you loosen the bolts you have four bolts that hold it down and then two in the back that are adjustment screws and I'll show you those a little bit later but some this pin could be over here can be in the back it could be anywhere and hopefully you have a pin because it makes it a lot easier to align now I've set up this model to just give you a representation of showing you what really happens when you start moving the head around two gauges set up here they're both accurate within a thousandth of an inch so these are now both zero if I move this one a full rotation this one here only moves about half a rotation so what I have is about a 1 to 2 ratio we need to understand that really well because if we're trying to change the diameter of this on both ends and get them to match we have to understand that when we move this whole thing this may move to inch or two thousandths of an inch this will move one thousandth so we have to understand how to compensate for the error and where the pivot point is and the test bar is a heavy thick piece of material this is about two inches in diameter and it's about eight inches long it's a good diameter make sure you get the largest metal you can because you want to make sure it's rigid and remember we're not going to put a Center on this because well that would defeat the purpose because we're trying to figure out how to get this lined up now we've already leveled the whole machine but that doesn't mean that it's an alignment that's where we get tricky we're level but now we're trying to find out for an alignment first thing I'm doing is I'm cutting out the center here so it's not interfering because I only need to know the information from this point to this point so let's take a quick measurement to see how far out we are this is going to be nine point nine point five and this is zero so we're off five tenths of an inch so we can bring that in now there's two ways we can bring it in is we can adjust the head which that's where I'm going to show you first but I'll tell you if you're within a half a thousandth over eight inches you're pretty dead-on now what I could also do right now is go back and adjust the leveling feet to do this but I'm going to work on the head here first of all what we want to do is we want to set up a test indicator so we can get an idea of how much movement we're really getting out of this I'm gonna use a starett it's accurate to ten thousandths of an inch now we can control how much we're actually going to move everything and I'd like to set up the indicator first before I loosen the head and you'll see why in a little bit let's loosen this up now what I want to do is I want to take each bolt loosen and then Snug it back up check my gauge so we've shifted just about a 10 thousandths now I've got two adjustment bolts right here that allow me to move the head in and out and this is kind of a trial and error so remember we want the needle to turn clockwise let's turn it 5/10 now I don't care where it's at at this point I only care at where it ads when I tighten it up I've also found that it is important to have both of these bolts snugged because they keep the whole head over time for moving here I want to come in at least two thousandths of an inch I'm struggling with getting a good cut this handles a little small for the weight and size of this carriage but let's see what we've got here twenty point five okay so we made it worse so I screwed up I've actually made it worse than it was before we're actually off about a thousandth now we're smaller on this end than this one well that's just the challenge you go on so I'm going to dance around with this for a while Wow I have to say I got really lucky on this I got this all lined up in let's see one two three four five steps pretty good in at about twenty minutes I think that's a new record for me I didn't think I get it into alignment we right now I've read it a couple times I'm coming out with about a half a tenth so it's pretty amazing I've got this lined up the bad news is guys I'm not going to do the leg leveling of this because I got this perfect I don't want to mess with it once you got it you don't mess with it but you can check out Jill pie he did a great video on this this old Tony also Jason from fireball tool and I'll put some links down below so you can check them out so I don't know if you guys just noticed the the coffee cup here these are now available plus t-shirts so if you want to help support the channel please go buy a mug buy t-shirt alright guys until next time go out in the shop build something cool thanks [Music]

Channel: Build Something Cool

Views: 66,256

Rating: 4.8818378 out of 5

Keywords: lathe alignment, leveling a lathe bed, leveling lathe machine, Resortration, restoring, Lathe rebuilding, metal lathe projects, metal lathe for beginners, metal lathe basics, metal lathe tips and tricks, metal lathe work, metal lathe restoration, precision level calibration, precision level reading, precision level lathe, lathe alignment test, lathe alignment procedure, lathe alignment bar, lathe alignment tool, lathe chuck alignment, lathe work metal, lathe work for beginners

Id: FER3aNLtcPs

Length: 16min 55sec (1015 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 20 2019