Inspecting a Lathe Before A Purchase Without Running It!

hey everybody welcome to precision machine shed i am brett and today new late time today what i want to do is kind of go over this machine so i just picked this thing up a week ago and i just got in my garage today and i have basically not touched this thing my goal today is try and give you guys a look at this thing the way i usually buy these things they can sometimes are rough sometimes they're in great shape but this one is a good example of something you might go out and if you're out there in the market to try and purchase a lathe maybe it's your first one maybe it's your second one maybe it's who knows but there are some things to look for when buying a machine like this so this is a used machine it's 1970s era harrison m300 it's a 13 by 40. it's one of my bucket list lathes and they don't come up very often so i actually found this one about five hours away and i went picked it up and here it be in my shop what i'm going to do is kind of go over some of the things that you can look for on these machines there's a lot of stuff a lot of people asking you know what do i look for in a machine how do i assess it you know what are some do's and don'ts and what am i looking at what i'm going to do with this one is this is a prime example of sometimes you go and look at a machine and it's not running it's not powered up either they don't have the the correct power source to power the lathe or it hasn't ran in several years so there are things that you can look for in some of these lays even when they're not running to verify if it's something you want to get involved in or not we'll start with the basics and then we'll kind of go from there and i'll give you a good idea of what i look for when i look for a lathe and i use lathe especially and show you some of the things to look for some of the more obvious things to look for you can get as involved as you want with these machines as far as measuring and checking all this other stuff but there's you know if this is your first lathe or you're just getting into this there's a few things that you can look for and it's pretty simple and it's easy stuff to remember so let's take a look and we'll kind of start with just an overall appearance of this thing as i said this is a mid 70s to late 70s closing m300 it's a 13 by 40 lathe it is a three-phase machine some of the nice features on this lather it has the speed controls it has the lead screw forward and reverse and neutral and also has the selector box for the gears for threading and feed and speeds this lathe has a d14 spindle on it so it will take dn4 back plates or 4d1 however you want to see it it does have hardened bed ways which is always a nice feature on a lathe also has a large dials both the compound and the cross feed and it has the carriage wheel and left threading nut and the feed engagements and it also has a one shot oiler when there's oil in there on off switch and this particular one is fitted with a travel dial so it's kind of cool and of course the threading dial down there this lathe also features the actual lead screw in the feed screw which is nice and another nice feature is that it has a foot brake which is very handy of course the first thing you do when you go to look at one of these machines is look at the overall appearance of the machine you can take a look at it and kind of see does it have a brand new paint job why does it have a brand new paint job are they trying to hide something that's or are they just trying to make it look nice so you pay more money this particular machine has the original paint job as you can see these machines at this time were painted this beautiful green color and it has not been repainted which is kind of nice for me because then i get a little better idea of the overall condition of the machine you can see where in the paint and a lot of the places like up here where things are set um up here people tend to put their hand up here over here where you're moving and then it also has up on top of the tail stock here people either set stuff or when they're moving it they usually grab it wherever they grab it and move it which is fine i also got a little bit of a backstory on this machine it came from a guy that passed away and another gentleman bought it and it sat in his unheated un climate-controlled garage that was fairly damp he did however he mentioned he dumped a bunch of transmission oil whatever type of oil he dumped all over it and that kind of kept some of the surfaces clean but a lot of them got rust and surface rust and it doesn't look the greatest but i think it's something that can be cleaned up one of the next things we're going to look at is what comes with this machine or buying you can get everything from everything under the sun to nothing at all so a couple basics you may want when looking for a metal working lathe there's a three-jaw chuck a four-jaw chuck some sort of a tool post a live center a dead center and a tail stock chuck would be nice those are kind of the absolute basics anything on top of that is great if you get a collet setup if you get a taper attachment if you get uh any sort of other attachments any sort of other chucks faceplates you know and the list goes on and on so with this particular one the guy kind of told me what he had there he didn't he didn't really know a lot about these things and he actually never got it powered up from what he told me um and not his fault he just wasn't very knowledgeable on on these types of machines he thought it was actually a 220 volt single phase so he gave me this uh 220 volt converter box that he purchased to try and run this thing and he instantly blew a fuse on that but those are like 100 bucks i don't know what i'm going to do with it but it's a 110 to 220 volt transformer and of course with this one i knew it had an alaris bxa tool post and then there's five holders with a monster boring bar holder and then this one and a couple other ones here a couple standard ones here's the tail stock or sorry excuse me the spindle adapter so this goes in your spindle and you can spin a dead center on there extra you know t-nut for the tool post and it had a collet attachment so this is a collet uh gear that goes on the end of the spindle which is nice and two extra gears which is nice to have miscellaneous stuff live center here's a pressure oiler that machine here's a wrench that came with the machine four jaw chuck a bunch of miscellaneous stuff some drill bits and some reamers that are in the box not a big deal and then the owner's manual which is very nice to have and that's nice to look through and and if you're unfamiliar with the machine you can look through that and look at that that motor is off something else so that's not part of it the next thing i look at on a machine if it has it are the oiler windows and this one has several of them and so we look here and there's usually a line in there with oil and you should be able to see it so there's one two three i believe on this machine and what you want to look for is that they're either have oil in them or they're topped off uh if there's no oil in them and either the machine hasn't run for a long time or they don't maintain it very well this particular one the headstock oil which is one of the main ones that has oil and it's full the gearbox on the gearbox selector is full and my apron is empty but that's kind of some of those aprons leak so that's not surprising but you kind of want to see oil in there if at all possible next place i usually go is underneath the headstock here is the chuck here is our v-ways front one is the v-way so we're going to look close and it usually doesn't take too much looking to figure it out but this one has some surface rust on it that's fine but what we're looking at is this surface paper towels work great because you can clean them off and what we see here is a wear ridge in the bed so this should be flat all the way across and right in the middle here we see a ridge so this a the saddle assembly has been riding on these v ways and not touching in the middle which is part of the design of this machine but um it's leaving a a wear mark there so we can see that and you can look all the way down the bed and see how far it goes most the time they're usually right up close under the chuck and that can tell you a couple things number one it's going to tell you it has some wear on it and if that has where the rest of the machine probably has wear to some extent or another doesn't always mean that the machine is shot or beat somebody could have used this machine as a sanding polishing machine and they might have just worn the ways out and the rest of the machine could be fine or they could have used the machine that much that the rest of the machine is worn out and you may want to evaluate that machine very closely and and see what you're getting yourself into the next place i go to is the headstock i kind of look and see what we're dealing with here so in order to assess this without actually turning the machine on ideally you would take this cover off look inside there look at all the gears make sure nothing's broke cracked chipped there's not metal in the bottom of the gearbox however some guys might not want to doing that so the way around that is we can check a few things this particular lathe has a neutral spot right there so we can spin it you can spin it listen for any noise i can hear the gears rolling just a little bit in there not too bad though not too no clunkiness no grinding no hard spots the spindle spins freely so that's good so we can put it in gear check it we can go through all the gears and when you get some of these higher speed gears you can spin it a little bit by hand this one you can spin pretty easy listen for noises and then we can go through these some of these other gears listen for noises not hearing much into that one go to this one and make sure it's in gear and go to the next one i think there's one more there we go go back and these get a little harder put it in gear and so you can turn it but it's hard so visually so physically without looking inside the gearbox i can get a pretty good idea that most of these gears are probably in pretty good shape might there be wear on them yes are they crack chipped broken possibly but this gives us a good idea that it's probably in good shape inside there we can do the same thing with the lead screw here spin the chuck on a either neutral or in a high gear and it should spin or both of our screws are turning there both directions and then while we're engaged here we can go through and change some of the gears in the gearbox so let's go through and not all these positions will turn both of those so give them a couple spins on each one and this should be pretty good to be able to turn them around and then down here we can change this one too make sure all that stuff's working make sure all these levers are moving freely and i got to go this way for this one and you can stop at each one spin it a little bit if you want but there we went through pretty much all of them and we didn't hear any noises it moved pretty freely and i'm pretty happy with that so i think if i had this thing powered up and running everything should work and i'm not too worried about it while we're looking at the headstock we'll go back open up the side gear cover and gear head lathes should always have gears out here to run the the gearbox and the thread cutting lead screws so i'll just spin the chalk and just look at the gears you don't need to really mess with them too much you can check and see if they're loose anywhere but these all spin pretty good there there's oil on them which is good and i see no broken chipped or cracked teeth so that's good right there so at this point i'm pretty happy with this end of the the lathe moving on to the whole apron carriage assembly there's a few things to look for here a lot of lathes especially a lot of old u.s main lathes will get loose in here everywhere almost a couple of the first things that i look at is the carriage hand wheel so this of course moves the whole assembly back and forth and you want to check and see how much slop is in there mostly will have a little bit this one ain't too bad the other thing is lift this handle up and down wiggle it around if it moves it might move just a tiny little bit but if it's loose in there and it wobbles you either have a worn shaft in here you have a worn housing or you can have worn both so that's something to look for and that kind of goes associated with a lot of other wear on the machine same thing with the cross slide this particular lathe has a backlash take up on the cross feed screw which is very nice but you can check backlash on these i don't even know what this one has not that much thirty five thousand so i could take that out but thirty five thousands isn't bad if you get like old south bends you can tighten it up back it up and then you'll you turn it the other way and you'll get play so that's my play before it reengages and then it starts moving the cross slide that way if you tighten this up and then you crank it around once or twice before it reengages you have a couple things wrong there you have potentially bad cross feed screw or a bad cross feed nut or both usually it's both that can be resolved to some extent however if you got a worn if those are worn you're probably going to have wear in the dovetails of your cross slide assembly here same thing with the compound this one is quite a bit tighter i don't know what there's seven eight thousands play in that one these usually tend not to get used quite as often as the cross slide but they can get wear on them i bought a lathe one time where the guy used nothing but this because this was broken so he only used this this was in great shape this was worn out this is easier to replace you can usually buy this whole assembly easier if you got to fix this as far as the wear in the gibbs and the dovetails you have to have it done by a professional if you don't know how to scrape and re-machine all those parts of course the half nuts you can lock them and move it back and forth a little bit and it should wobble a little bit sometimes these lead screws have a clutch pin in them where if you lock everything up it'll spin the pin out in that case they may move back and forth a little bit but this one's pretty tight you can check these there we go now it's engaged so that's engaged and if we want to go the other way there we go now that's crossfeed is engaged so both those lock up good the way they're supposed to one shot oiler there's no oil in there so i can't really test that one of the last things we're going to look at visually is tail stock so we can check and see backlash on this and this there's almost no backlash which is great the next thing we're going to do is we're going to slide this thing off the end here and careful because sometimes these are heavy i'm going to very gently set it back up here we're gonna tip this thing over and we're gonna look underneath here here's the front edge of our tail stock and what we're looking for here is the base so sometimes on these machines you can get you can feel down here if there's any scoring sometimes you can see the original hand scraping marks if it's an older lathe the one thing you do want to look for though is there is usually a little ridge and this one has it right here and no surprise this machine is 50 years old so there's a tiny little ridge if you can see right there there's the original surface and here's the wearing surface and there's maybe a you can just get it with my thumbnail maybe a couple thousands wear on that it's usually on the front edge not as much on the rear edge because when you're pushing it pushes down on the front so we do have a tiny bit of wear on this but a couple thousands is not a big deal and these tail socks can be shimmed between the the base plate and the actual tail stock they can be shimmed to straighten them out so it's not the end of the world there either and of course the last thing i'm going to look at after i've been fairly satisfied with the rest of the machine you know we looked at it and we figured it's you know it's okay for what we want take a look at the chuck and the spindle and the reason i do this last is because if ever if nothing else checks out and this is garbage then well there's no use but i mean i suppose you could do it first first things first but um either way you want to get a pretty good idea if the rest of the machine is in pretty good shape the spindle is usually in pretty good shape as well so that's why i do it last you could do it first like i said but it doesn't matter so what we want to do here is get a chuck in there and i don't care about run out on this bar it's it's not really going to tell you much what is going to tell you a little bit or actually quite a bit is you should get a test indicator and this is a half a one thousands this is a swiss half thousandths indicator and what i'm going gonna do is i'm gonna put it on our spindle so when we get this guy on here i'm gonna put it up right next as close as i can okay so our is set up here and what i want to do this bar is about a foot long and it's clamped tight in our three jaw chuck here and what i'm looking for is how much play i can get out of that thing this harrison lathe has gamut bearings in it which are pretty high precision bearings and i believe i was reading through the manual it said somewhere between one and two tenths of a thousands it shouldn't be running more than a couple tenths of a thousandths out so that's what we're looking for and what i'm going to do is just lift up here kind of as strong as i can in that try it one more time i'm going to push down and push back up push down push back up and that needle barely moves so that's a half a thou indicator and it's moving maybe a couple thousands so i'm pretty happy that next thing i'm going to do and we have to keep in mind here that this surface is rough i'm going to spin this spindle slowly and watch for any movement in that needle and it's jumping around because there's rust on the surface but it is staying from one side to the other spot on the mark maybe a couple maybe a thousandth or two out there's the rust but it's staying pretty much where it needs to stay it's not moving very much if any so i'm pretty happy with that that tells me that the bearings are probably still in good shape and they are probably snugged down to the proper tension are pretty close this all may depend on what type of lathe you have for a little comparison here is my south bend heavy 10. this is uh i think this is a late 70s early 80s model and it's in a really good shape actually the thing to keep in mind when testing these bearings like this is some ways have more clearance specked out to them than others that harrison has maybe a tenth or two this south bend has maybe one to two thousands so ten times as much on this machine not to say it's a bad machine but it uh you have to keep that in mind when you're looking at these things just to show you i know you can't see it the greatest there but i'm going to push down on this and then i'm going to lift up so that's pushing up and down i get just over a thousandths of an inch so this machine is actually in pretty good shape too it's for the type of these are sleeve bearings that ride on oil so right out of thousands maybe a tad bit more that's kind of the lower end of where you want to be on these south bends if you're getting more than two thousands that's not great that's not good if you're getting less than a thousands that bearing might be too tight in there and you'll have to go in there and adjust it and it might be burned up so you gotta be careful with these south bends because they're they can be touchy but this one looks to be in good shape all right so there we go there's my little uh overview of kind of what i look for when i'm shopping for a lathe i did exactly what i showed you guys minus i didn't stick an indicator on the spindle when i bought this thing when i picked it up i saw it for sale i told the guy i'm going to it's what i want as long as it's in decent shape and what's there is what's there i'll buy it he wasn't asking a lot for this machine and i'll tell you what i paid for it if you comment below and let me know what you're thinking what i'm going to do next with this machine is i'm going to go through and clean it get it cleaned up how i want it i'm not going to repaint it because i don't have time to repaint this thing it's just not in my time budget and i'm going to make sure actually once it is fired up and running it actually functions the way i want it to function if it does that being that i've wanted this later for a long time i might actually send it out and get the bed ground i'm not sure it's only a thousands or two but we'll see so that's next step all right guys i hope that helped you out a little bit and if you're going out to look for a new lathe it always helps to bring somebody with that has a little bit of experience with metal working machines or equipment and they can look for something sometimes that you may forget or even write a checklist of things that you want to look at while you're there so you don't forget because i've been there before i've looked at a machine and then i get there and i'm going through all these things that i think i want to look at and then i say yeah i'll buy it and i buy it and then i get home and i'm like oh crap i forgot to look at that or i forgot to look at that and you know most times you luck out and it's okay but it's just one more thing everything you can check off the list will make you get a better deal or get the machine that you want to get i'm also going to go over in a future video about how i go about buying these machines kind of the process i go through what i pay for some of them i might actually go through my shop and let you guys know what i paid for some of these machines because a lot of people want to know out there what is this worth what is that worth and it's hard to put a dollar value on some of these things there's a retail market out there that's kind of a a gray you know a borderline midline price on all these things but depending on who's selling it and where you get it from it can go high it can go low can go anywhere in between so i'm going to make a video to show you guys how i go about buying machines how i find them how i buy them kind of some of the process of going through and you know maybe getting them at a price on a machine or just getting the machine so that will be in a future video and comment below and let me know if there's anything you would like to hear me talk about in that video because there's a lot of stuff i'm going to cover there and how i can purchase a machine like this at the price that i got it at alright if you guys like that please be sure to like comment share and subscribe with the notification i got more great videos coming up i'm going to be doing more with this guy i've got some other machines over here i got this machine right here my little south bend that i haven't been messing with lately and i've got all sorts of other stuff going on and check out my patreon if you haven't done that already i'm going to be doing more videos on that and i'm actually going to be putting one out here in the next couple days i believe about uh a prs rig that i built so be sure to check it out till next time see you guys later thanks for watching

Channel: Precision Machine Shed

Views: 17,887

Keywords: Harrision, M300, metal, lathe, buying a lathe, inspecting a lathe, 13x40, metal lathe, metalworking, metal shop, metal turning, purchasing a lathe, inspection, lathe condition, evaluation, south bend, gunsmithing, gunsmith lathe, machine rebuilding, assessment, condition

Id: EZmnGnmYjXk

Length: 26min 0sec (1560 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 13 2021