Machine Rebuilding: Measuring Wear in a Lathe Bed and Building up the Saddle

[Music] hello ki Drucker vis machinery org well if you watch my channel regularly you saw about a week or so ago we finished up the second Richard King hand scraping and machinery building class that was taught here at my shop we have about a 10 or 12 people in for a week learning about hand scraping and machinery building I've taken the class previously I've been you know I'm working on my scraping techniques but what I really wanted to concentrate on was working on this lathes actually did some rebuilding and I want to take advantage of having Richard King here during the week to kind of help me learn about how to properly do measurements on this machine to figure out where and come up with an appropriate game plan on on how to proceed so I didn't really do a whole lot of scraping in the class per se I really spent more time working on on really this machine and it was also helpful that Lance palsy who was another second time classmate who was here he took the class back in the winter when I took it the first time he was here as well and he was actually working on his monarch 10 ee where he sent his bed out and had it read ground he was scraping the saddle and all that kind of stuff him while he was here so it was really nice because his machine is very similar to mine does on a little bit smaller scale same basic construction and stuff both I'm being monarchs and I was kind of able to watch what he's doing because he was a little bit ahead on me he had his bed was already done already had her kite in his saddle and he was just basically getting it tuned in so he was watching him real close throughout the week and also kind of getting mine up to speed so just a little bit about this machine here or a little bit about what you're about to see so we started out with just getting some good measurements on the waves themselves so that we really kind of knew what condition this machine was in and where our starting point is and I shot a little bit a video will I put that in for you see here so on this machine before I did anything else the first thing I want to do is to get the bed fairly level level as I could and and it's actually pretty level right now and we've talked about leveling machines before and the importance of that and the term leveling is somewhat of a misnomer you're really not the machine does not have to be perfectly leveled in all directions what we're trying to do more than anything else is to take the twists out of the bed so I want the bed as far as on the level to read the same on this thing as I do on the other now if it's actually a a little bit one way or the other that's not important what's important is it's exactly the same now as far as the tilt going up and down you know you want it to be fairly level on this machine I actually purposely have the back end of the machine up a little bit higher in the front end and the reason is is because there's a a sump down the bottom of this machine for coolant and the drain is right over here so what you really want to do is you want to have the back end up so the water or the cooler runs down to this end and even ideally you may even want to tilt it back you know I'm not talking much but just tilt the whole bed back just a little bit so that it's running toward the back back there but have it same on both ends so to do this I started out I built a little jig here this is just made with some one to three blocks I got a piece of all thread in there and you know I'm running on the two flats on here right now and you know I start up here close to the headstock there's not a lot of wear in the bed on this end or on the other end because there's the carriage and particularly on these two ways there's just not a lot of where those in so I'm working on maybe not perfectly virgin surfaces but they're there they're pretty good and I started with my regular there at number 98 machinist level and this level is accurate I think five thousandths of an inch per foot I got it leveled and once I got level with the CEREC number 98 I went to my Stairmaster precision level which is level accurate to a half thousand per foot so this that level here is much more accurate and I dialed in using my leveling feet on the end down here we dialed it until we got this dead-on level and then I went to the other end machine again down on the end where there's very little wear on those ways because you just don't travel to that in the machine very much we did the same thing and I love them the other end I went back and forth until we got both sides reading the same thing on the level and the nice thing about this little rig that I built right here is that I've got to set up where I've got a little Block in the back the backside back here is machined flat and square and that's also a surface that doesn't really see a lot of wear so that's a good datum to work off a can do measuring off of this backside and that's what I'm going to do here next is actually measure these ways off of the statum in the back but right now I'm looking to see how much wear is in here and I can just slide this level down to various spots and I can now look on my bubble and see where it's at now let me zoom you in here I want you to see what I'm looking at all right so I'm looking here and this is fairly level and it's not basically my bubble is right on the back edge back there on this line and the angle I don't know if you can even see it in the screen but the angle you're looking at may not look I can look straight down on it but if you look right here in the ways you can actually see some wear marks right here and the the carriage when it goes back and forth it actually rubs right here and you've got some pretty nasty looking wear marks in there you get down a little bit farther and you don't see those but this is where most of the wear in the machine is going to take place because this is where most of the work that saddle SAP what I'm going to do is I'm going to slide this down and kind of get over this where and you see the bubble is starting to drop off so it's moved right there it's moving one line in there now my level is accurate to point zero zero zero five inches per foot so a half a thousand four foot or five ten thousandths of an inch per foot now between these two this is about nine inches between we're measuring so we're not really measuring the whole foot so you have to take that into consideration so really it's about two thirds of a foot that I'm measuring so do the math that actually comes out each line in this case is measuring three and a third tenth so right here the saddle has dropped down by about little over three tenths we can slide down a little bit more and you can see that bubble moving some more right there it's moved about three lines so that's three six nine that's a thousandth low right there for all intents and we move it on down some more and it's down a little bit more I'm estimating now I've done this throughout the length of the machine and I'm not going to show you every bit of it but right in here there's a little belly in here that it drops down a little over mm so we got to thousands of dips at least in this one way right here now once you get just past this it starts going back up to zero by the time you get to the end of the machine it's back up to the zero mark so anyway this is just a way that we can start to look and see what kind of where we've got in here my next step is is we're going to put an indicator on here and we're going to actually measure on both sides of this way and again I'm working off of a area back here that should not have seen where it's a good datum to work off of and we can start to measure with an indicator how much wear is in this way and I'll bring you back and show you some that a little bit all right so update on my monarch here I've been doing some more measuring and just using the same little jig here that I built oven what I'm measuring right now is the anywhere in this way on the front so specifically what I'm measuring is is how much we're in this direction not down but how much from side to side and I've gone through here and basically I got on the back and moved the indicator holding it nice and steady I had another classmate come in here and write down the measurements just on the way and surprisingly it's not as bad as I thought it was going to be so we started out in zero it's about a thousandth in here about a thousand and a half back to the thousands of thousand again this is where most of the where is zero zero thousand thousand so once you get down here it's actually out a little bit but are from down here but this this area has where there's plus one on the end is probably more original finished but bottom line is is I've only got about a thousands and a half at the worst right here in this direction which while it's not perfect it's really not terrible either so next thing I'm gonna do is come in here we're going to measure this side of this way and this side theoretically should be the side really to have most of the wear in it because of the tool pressure as you're pushing is pushing on this way so I'm going to set up we're going to come in here and measure this one alright so back over here on my monarch ladies I've got my little jig here set up I got my indicator coming down on the backside of this way vid the exact same thing we came in here and basically just mapped this thing out all the way to up and down to kind of see I just took a Sharpie pen and wrote on here you know we started with zero right here which I know there's we're down here but that's just kind of my four I'm starting at because -1 this is thousands minus 1000 minus 1 1 back to zero then it goes plus 2 Plus 3 and pretty much plus 3 the rest of the way down the bed so in reality down here this is the area that has seen little of nowhere so in reality this is 0 my plus 3 so if you go through here and you kind of look at it we've got about 4,000 we're on the backside of this this way so again not perfect but it's not absolutely terrible either so after doing all the measurements and you know we've already talked about that a little bit but at the end of day I consulted with Richard you know what do we do about the bed on this machine I had two options scraping it was not and really a very good option because this is these are hardened ways just really can't do that very effectively so I could either take the headstock off get down to just this casting send it off have everything reground down to you know precision factory new conditions or I could just live with what I got and the cost of getting this machine re ground I you know I haven't gotten any quotes I'm estimating it probably would cost between 5,000 and 10,000 dollars just depending on who it went to whether shipping was involved in etc etc a lot of money and quite honestly once I got this machine completely restored you know I probably couldn't even get my money out of it I would have known that had been dead and that's right but is really just this machine would not have demanded that even in a rebuilt state so while there is we're in here in the grand scheme of things is relatively minimal you know we're talking about probably three thousands total we're in the worst part of the bed which is kind of right here where most of the work happens and 3000th where three thousand kind of downward where and here does not necessarily mean you're when you're turning something is going to be three thousand South that's more to do with alignment you know as your tool is going if it drops or raises three thousandths of an inch but it's running parallel it's not going to affect the diameter of what you're turning that much it will affect it to a small extent but after talking Richard we just said you know what we're just we're going to live with what we got and quite honestly I've worked on machines that have a lot more wear than this in them this machine in it and I've done very good work on those on those lathes so anyway we decided to stick with it so the next step once we determined what the wear was how much where where it was at etc etc with mapping this thing out we went to the the saddle that rides on here and we really started evaluating that and looking at how much wear was on that and I'll again we're going to go to some other videos here and you can kind of see some of the things we did and the game plan to bring you guys up to date on the big monarch 16-inch lathe continuing to work on this under Richard Kings guidance and thank goodness he's here because I don't know that I've been brave enough to do what I'm about to do this thing without his encouragement and his advice and expertise but what I've got here this is the saddle off of my lathe over here and we've done a lot of measuring over the last couple of days I've been running around kind of helping with scraping class at the same time working on my lathe and it's been kind of slow going but we've done a lot of measuring looking at the wear on the machine I showed you what the ways look like they were there and while they're not perfect they're not terrible in the grand scheme of things either and what we decided to do is okay let's see if we can work on the saddle and take care of the issues because those are harden ways you know yes there is somewhere in them probably about three thousands we're in the worst place but you know they're hardened that's not where most of the wear took place most of the work took place in the saddle because this is a casting it is not hard this is actually where the wear is intended to happen and there's multiple kinds of wear in here and I could probably can come in here and kind of talk about that but what we've decided to do is we're going to actually build these surfaces back up with a rule on and I grabbed a piece of it here all right so this is a sheet of rule on it's a plastic type material it looks like it has maybe some like impregnated metal in it but these are basically for building up wear in machine ways and machine pieces and it's designed exactly that purpose a lot of brand-new machines instead of actually having cast iron alloys they actually use rulon or Kirk height similar product for the things to ride on and what we're going to do is we're going to actually apply this product into the ways on the bottom of the the saddle here and we will scrape this end to match the lathe now by adding this material we're able actually to build this back up and there was you know looking at all the different where the work about the worst place in here is about 20,000 square so this is actually this material here is what it's a 47,000 thick so it's going to go in here but this is too thick right now and the reason I've got this set up on the mill is we're actually going to mill some material out of these ways these wear surfaces in here so that we can apply this rule on and not have so much material that have to take back out so the step I'm going to do here is we're going to actually mill this out mill this flat mill this v and take some material out yes I'm nervous about it but at the same time this doesn't have to be I mean it needs to be set up it needs to be done right but you know if it's not perfectly flat we're going to scrape the rule on the end to get it actually getting the machine itself so you know it doesn't have to be perfect it needs to be pretty darn close though so let me most leave me any kind of talk about some of the we're in here and how we did some measuring on that so when I was looking at where and here the first thing I did and I can't really show it to you now because we've already taken these out but right along the top here there was a little Ridge on both sides there's also as one over here and basically that's where this way is wider than the way that it's riding home and over time that that's this wore down it left a little wear Ridge on the edge now the the bottom of that wear Ridge was original material so we were able to actually come in here with a depth mic and I was using a smaller one this but just kind of show you and I was able to measure the height of that Ridge all the way down through here one of the key things when you're looking at machine where is you need to find a surface that you can reference off of and in that case that the top of that that Ridge was original and then use down to where it's warm so we were able to go in here and I mapped things out I actually wrote measurements under the measurements around here or something else right now but I was able to kind of see you know how much we're down was there and on this way here it ranged anywhere from I think on one end it was it was eight thousands on the end the other end it was ten thousands on the end in the middle that was about four or five thousand so you just kind of get some rocking so the the ends tend to wear a little bit worse and also the inside where of course because that's where the pressure from school pressure is on the lathe I also took a dowel pin dropped it down into this groove you know again the surfaces here and here these are unworn surfaces particularly here this is where the this mounts down on top of the apron so I was able to come in here we again with a depth of mic and I was able to measure down to that dowel pin and that also gave me some that's what the measurements on here are showing how far things had worn down in there and it basically went the low was zero the high was two and a half and it doesn't show you the total wear that you get that more from the eight thousands for whatever then ten thousands that I had on this Ridge but what this tells me is how much difference there is and the how much taper there is to this and so this is the days that gets the worst where this is the front edge of the apron of the saddle and it bit basically became zero and it was about two and a half thousand deeper on this end then on this end and in the process of doing all this I'm taking those I'm mapping it out on a piece of paper I'm adding all these measurements together and it kind of tells me how much material I need to take out of here to put the rule on in to prefer to add some some material back in so anyway that's where we're at now we've got to set up on the mill you know this saddle doesn't really fit the mill the only place the clamp is in the middle which is where the the trough slide is that's the high spot so we've got it clamped here had a lot of stuff cantilever it out here on the edges that was not good so I took some 3/8 inch bar we bolted that down there's actually set screws on the bottom of this bar coming up and touching all four corners here so I've basically added support out here beyond the edge of the table to support everything and hopefully that's going to be a nice firm foundation on here we swept this back here in the back of the indicator we've got this lined up so hopefully here pretty soon we're going to go ahead and mill out some material I don't remember exactly how much material we calculated we're going to have to take off in different places but we're going to have to take out I think about 20 thousands off of most of this to put the rule on in this morning of day for our excuse me day five the last day of the scraping class and probably give you an update on my lathe here it's kind of funny I've been a scraping class all week and I haven't even done any scraping I've been more machinery building stuff this time around we set this up on the on my lathe or on the milling machine I kind of had to build a carriage for it to sit on because it was so big it was bigger than table we clamped it down in the center but it was kind of cantilever it out on the edges where it could tip so I took some 3/8 entra or three-eighths inch bar stock bolts down the table we put some screws in the bottom that came up and kind of touched on the four corners to support it I actually put an indicator on there and pulled the screws up and when the indicator started showing that it was moving I knew that my screws were touching and I had a lock screw on there and tighten them up but once we got that done we milled out the stuff straight up and down my guys were actually moving the apron like make path basically we make thank god man Mountain collar on the ground but then I nodded my head over to 45 degrees and I milled out the V in the ways or the ways so that was we used the bottom of the mill for part of her part of it and we did the side of the mill on the other one and I didn't read if an operation such as the bottom birth and then we came in and did decide so what it's heading on one side at a time once that was done we took the the roulade material I cut my strips and I mixed up some two-part epoxy that's made for this this material and we epoxy that into the bottom and basically what you see here beside me this this pilot contraption is the clamping system so we actually use the bed of the machine to as a form because this is what it's going to go on to so I actually put you can see on here some saran wrap on the only ways to keep any epoxy off and then we put the Turk height on top of that put the epoxy course was on on both of the part and the ways are the strips and with a bunch of people we came over here and basically set it down and kind of got our strips in there and then all this weight is just clamping pressure and we let that epoxy set overnight this is actually all ready to come off now and what I have to do is clean everything up trim up the rule on because it's you know we cut it bigger so that in case it shifting around or whatever so I have to trim all this stuff up and hopefully when we get through I can start scraping the rule on now to actually fit the bill ways on the bed so anyway interesting project this is going to take the wear out of the saddle it's going to get the saddle back up to the height that it should be and give us basically a nice level surface to work off on because there was so much more worn on front side them on the back which is what you'd expect because that's the where the pressure is from the turning of the tools was on the front of the of the saddle so anyway a little update on this apologize we didn't have video step by step but it was just so crowded in the shop of so many people and also so loud in here it was really difficult for me to try to set up cameras and get videos while we were doing this people were bumped into cameras and you couldn't hear anything because of the noise level so you know I look quick update so I got the saddle pulled off for the ways over here we glued in this rule on semi trailers truck height and you can see this of these swear strips in here now so you know this is a Teflon type material and it's built up now again we machine the ways out to make room for this taking into consideration the wear and you know it's pretty close it's pretty close but now what I got to do is come in here and trim all this stuff up you know we cut this stuff a little oversized get all the epoxy off of here so what you're looking at now this is basically where we ended up with at the end of class and I've still got a lot of work to do to this saddle to get it exactly right but we've got the the Turk ID is in here or in this case rule on torque I realize basically the same by the way I kept telling you guys the material and I've clarified found out more about this material so this is basically a Teflon plastic and it's impregnated with bronze and I know a lot of people are saying when I would want to have that on my machine there's actually been a lot of tests done this stuff wears better than cast iron does which is why a lot of newer machines particularly CNC machines me me being made today they come directly from the factory with this Turk I to rule on in there and again the studies have shown that it holds up better over time and the nice thing about this is is when it does where instead of having to go in there machine everything out like I did you can just pull the old rule on out because in their spec it back in in your ad goes so you know not original but this definitely I think an improvement at least this case a couple of comments you know the amount of material we had to take out of this we added up the we're over on the bed in the different places we added up to where we were able to measure in here also used a level just sliding this back and forth and looking at how much tilt difference there was in different places and you know we came in here and calculated and I wrote in here in different places you know how much material need to be taken out in different places in here to get it back down to original and of course there was a different amount of where on both sides here we basically took the same amount out and we took some off the back and you know if we did all our math right this part when it goes back on the lathe it should at least be the level are fairly close to it and we can adjust that by scraping in here you know I showed you how it looked like when it came right out we've since trimmed all this stuff up when you epoxy this Turk ID in you want purposely leave it a little bit long because this stuff will creep on you while it's dry and while it's still wet stage you get the weight on it and it's just like it wants to slide a little bit so you leave it a little bit long and I didn't see where it had done much creepin but richard recommends leaving about an inch on either side anyway we got all this cleaned up I did kind of come in here and do some rough scraping in the centers on these two surfaces which is the way it was originally the center's here you really don't want this part touching the ways you want them to be touching on the ends because you don't want to have a high spot middle in this thing rocks you want to be touching on the four corners so we relieved out the middle is a little bit just using a hand scraper I blued up the waves on the lathe and without any real scraping other than just cleaning it up we put it on here and you can actually see the blue in here so you know we're kind of touching here and here so we got fairly decent contact right through here right off the bat touching a little bit on here not so much out on the ends same thing in here we're touching here and here we got a little bit of contact here bottom line is you know for no scraping right out of the bat I've got contact pretty much in all four areas you know maybe here we need to kind of take a little bit more out here and get try to move some of the contact out this end but that's my next step is we're going to have to get all this striped in quite honestly I'm probably going to need to have someone here to help me while I'm doing that this is just too big of a piece to be picking up and moving around by myself and with having to flip it over and stuff well I could use my engine hoist to do it it's just easier if you have a second person to do it rather than trying to do it that way so yeah well this is going to be a project for down the road but we've made good progress on it well there you go guys that's kind of where we're at now on the lathe restoration and this is probably going to be a project I'm gonna work on this summer it's kind of my next machine the cue I really want to get this thing going so I'll have a little bit more capacity when I got onto the blonde over there plus I really it's going to be a nice machine we get done with it so this will be my summer project more than likely there are a few other things that I just quickly mentioned that we did of course we took the saddle and apron and all that off we took all the the screws and lead screws and feed drives all that off while we were to get everything off unfortunately it was just so hectic in here I didn't have a camera running so you guys didn't get to see all that you'll get to see it all go back together I also had a broken piece down here on the feed lever and I've got all that apart I'll show you guys that in a later video and I'm gonna have to do some repair work there the good news is is I think it's repairable so anyway we'll cover that down the road when I get to that point the next thing I really want to do is I want to pull the top off of this and do a good visual and section of the years I have kind of you know just turning the headstock and watching the gears run I don't hear anything that causes them any concern but I really want to lay eyes in here I've taken the bolts out of the top and whoever does this machine's been into before and whenever they put this back on before they used silicon as a gasket material in here and this thing is stuck I mean it is just absolutely glued together right now so I'm going to have to figure out a way to break that silicon in there and get this thing taken apart I'm a little bit aggravated with it be honest with you I have to figure out the best way of doing that I'm probably I don't I don't know how I'm gonna do it I was hoping I could just put a couple of screws in here and tape my my engine hoist and just pick up on it and break it that way but there's there's no way to do that without drilling and tapping some holes in here which I really don't want to do and I don't know I may try to see if I can put a little heat on it or something then get it loosened up that way but I really wanted to get my eyes in there and check it out but with that that's going to be a wrap for right now and we'll be doing more work on this machine throughout the summer like I previously said I've got a few other projects I'm really need to get wrapped up and I've actually started on a few other things where we got to get the the lead screw for that lathe that I'm working on and it seems like every time I get started on that I run into another little snag I need another little tool or need to do another step before we get done but that's really at the top of my list right now to get that finished up and there if you have a little little jobs in here I need to get knocked out we'll have some videos on those as they come in as well but hopefully we'll have this beast running soon maybe at least by the end of summer but that thanks for watching guys and stay tuned we'll be bringing you more on the monarch 16-inch lathe restoration as it goes [Music]

Channel: Keith Rucker - VintageMachinery.org

Views: 199,052

Keywords: Machine Shop, Machinist, Lathe, Restoration, Vintage Machinery, Woodworking, Metalworking, how to run a mill, Keith Rucker, VintageMachinery.org, Milling Machine

Id: Ijf2MA4vi_0

Length: 34min 22sec (2062 seconds)

Published: Fri May 26 2017