Pouring Babbitt Bearings on the J. A. Vance Planer/Matcher

hello my name is Keith Rucker it's good to be back in the shop today after a little hiatus I guess or the last couple of weeks my works travel schedule has really had me on the road had to make a trip out to California week before last and then got home late Friday night and over last weekend of course Saturday is usually the day I'm out the shop working on things but over last weekend we had a little family thing going on so I wasn't able to get out here really at all last weekend and then this past week has just been crazy with work again traveling so this is my busy time of the year at work and this is uh but it is Saturday now I'm out here at the Museum and we're going to have a good day working the goal today is to get some bearings poured on the dance master so we're going to get started on that here in just a minute before I do though I wanted to tell you guys about a few little things that came in the mail over the past week or two while I've been on my little hiatus from YouTube and share those with you guys so first off I got this nice little hammer here and you guys if you watch a Tom Lipton's channellocks tools or you watch a Adam Adams channel of a bomb 79 both those guys have also received one of these hammers in recent weeks and have detailed it but if you haven't if you don't watch their channels or you haven't seen these little hammers I thought I'd just share real quickly with you so this came from randy richard out in california sent this to me he contacted me a couple weeks ago wanted to get my mailing address to send me a little something in the mail so I was real tickled when this came so he made this out of recycled material so the it's got copper caps on either side so it's kind of a soft blow hammer and these were made out of some copper cap screws he had laying around a scrap the top part of the hammer here was made out of steel this is from recycled from a concrete stake and then the ham handle is aluminum and that's made out of a part off of a snowmobile track and of course the caps are threaded into here and the handle is threaded in a very nice work very nice finish and you know I guess when I saw these on the other channels I really didn't appreciate how nice this little hammer is until you get to hold it in your hand I really like the fact that the handle is made out of aluminum because it just gives it a good balance you've got plenty of weight up here on the head but the handles not too heavy so we're going to put this in the toolbox and I'm sure you'll be seeing us use this from time to time that's going to be very handy thank you very much Randy I really appreciate uh send that along it's always exciting to to get a little package in the mail something unexpected and see see something nice come in and I'm always looking to put stuff in the toolbox so we'll put this in the toolbox right now all right next thing that came in the mail this past week was another little gift package I guess from Tom Lipton over Doc's tools in the Tom a few weeks back had sent me a little care package with several things in it but one of the things that he sent me were some of these little maxy flex gloves and since he said to me I have really I have just fell in love with these things these things were great shop gloves they're light they're thin they've got kind of a rubber coating it's not rubbers from some other material but give you some grip but it helps keep your hands clean helps protect them and with the winter we've been having this year it also gets a little bit of warmth out here in the shop so anyway I've got my my first pairs that he sent me and I've been wearing these for a couple of weeks now and uh I'm going to keep on wearing these until I just absolutely wear them out but you can tell they're getting dirty and starting to get a little bit of wear on them a couple of places in the gloves have gotten into the grinder or wire wheel or some so I've got some little scars starting to show up on these he sent me three more pair and I'm going to have to order me some of these and keep them in stock out here at the shop because they're really really nice the first ones he sent me were extra-large and that's what I've been wearing and he sent me two more pairs of extra-large but he also sent me a pair of large ones which are just a little bit smaller so the the extra larges have been fitting real well and I've enjoyed them I tried the large ones on at the house and I haven't used them in the shop yet and they seem just a little bit tight on my hand but I'm gonna give them a try and in fact I may wear some of these large ones today to see how they are I think they made it just a little bit tight they were at the house they were feeling like it was my fingers were just starting to kind of maybe just not getting none but you just not really get that good circulation to them so I think these may be a little bit too tight for my hands but I'm gonna try those Tom said he liked likes for them to fit real tight because he can just do more with them someone give those a try but I'm thinking the extra large is going to be where I want to be on these so we're getting ready to do the babbit pour on the machine but before I can really get everything set up start pouring the babbit I need to make a little jig I guess you call it to hold the shaft into the bearing shells as we're pouring it and this is what I usually do or a lot of times we're doing I'm doing a shaft like this if I want to have something that kind of some caps that come in on either side of that bearing shell that will basically serve as a dam to keep the molten Babbitt from pouring out but it'll also kind of hold that shaft and position it into place so I'm going to make disobey cyclists I guess you'd say that we will turn out of Steel and use those on either side and that will serve two purposes again serving as a dam and also to hold the shaft in place I've got a little drawing here of what I want to do I've gone out made some measurements my shafting of my bearing shells and I think I've got a plan here and what I'm going to do so anyway I've got a piece of Steel chucked up over here in the lathe and we're going to just make four of these spacers two for each of the bearing shells that we will then go there and put on the machine so I've got a piece of steel this is just a C this is a just a little cut off of some shafting or actually I guess this is from an axle off of some railroad stuff that the museum got at some point in time we got some some new wheels for our railroad which we have narrow-gauge out here but the wheel sets that they got were actually standard gauge these were like for just some small like carts or whatever that we can roll on the track but anyway they had to cut it down from standard gauge sanera gauge and when they did they they ended up with a bunch of these little slugs of cut-offs here and so these are I think a two and three-quarter inches in diameter about six inches long real rusted missus old old metal I don't know what great it is it's still it's not cast but anyway this is what I'm going to use this is just like I said some scrap material laying around so we're going to put it to good use but I have no idea what great it is so anyway I got that chucked up in lathe we're going to turn that down will bore it out so that the shaft will fit through it and I then cut some steps on there as you'll see as we get along all right so we're going to start by just cleaning up this surface here getting a good clean surface on there then I'll punch a hole in there and we'll come back and finish that up we get the whole board in so let's see where we're at on the lathe here the 89 I'm on proper through 100 thousands cut here and which take 200 thousand total diameter very nice I was making a nice blue chip here cut very well I'm pleased with that I'm just recently upgraded to this larger tool holder and I can really put some truly on here this more appropriate for this size machine so anyway I was tickled to make that big heavy cut there and it looks great alright let's uh punch a hole in this now and we'll come back and finish that outside diameter after we get a whole board through here to the right size when I'm but I meantime I'm boring and turning outside diameters I typically like to try to get my inside diameter turned about where I won't it first and then I'll come back and finish up my outside you know that's just I guess personal preference this is the way I like to do it so let's get a hole punch in there and we'll start going you then all right we got that drilled out to one inch now we're going to start working on boring that out to the ancient 7:16 we've let it cool off for a little while now I've switched boring bars I said while ago I had a one inch boring bar it was actually a three quarter inch so now I've got my one inch fourteen bar and there was to give you a little more rigidity is we go down here we let this cool off we measure and I've got about 30 thousandths of an inch to still take out so we're going to come in and touch off of this borne bar probably take about half of that amount with the first pass then we'll get a good clean measurement and know how far we need to go on the second pass to make our final cut we've got about 12 thousands to go a well it should be our final pass you No that's perfect see that action we're springing in there that's the air suction holding that shaft that means I got a good tight fit in there so that's going to be perfect now if I get it out I got such and holding it in I want to dam up there we go alright we got our outside diameter now to go I got about 170,000 yet to cut on this pass so we'll go back in here calibrate take about a hundred thousands passing and finish it up on the next pass this outside diameter here is not critical I'm shooting for about a two and a quarter inches but you know no no tight tolerance on it at all should be about a hundred thousand so 50 thousands on each side all right two and point two five oh right on the money all right now I want to cut a one and three-quarter inch step in here a quarter of an inch deep so I'm going to make a little witness mark there at a quarter of an inch let's close enough no critical here at all either alright we got about a hundred thousands to go there about facing on that right on the money good job all right now we're going to come in here and part this off that speed down you I'll show you guys the tooling that we use for doing this so for the regular just outside turning I'm using this CNM G bit now our cutter it's really the first time I've had a chance to use this on that machine doing some heavy turning and I was very pleased after upgrading so just to give you an idea of what I have been using this was the cutter that I had been using with a smaller this was for a 10-inch blade some old tooling that I had from an old machine and I recently upgraded to the ca holders which gave me the capacity to go up to this larger turning tool so because of that I'm now able to make much bigger heavier cuts and and work a lot faster and more efficiently on this machine so I know a while back I had some guys giving me a hard time because I was making light cuts on my machine and saying that my machine was junk or whatever because uh but reality it was because of my tooling my tooling was my was what was holding me back from making those you know hundred thousandths and two hundred thousand cuts so with this new C a holder and using that CMG carbide insert there you know you could tell I was very easily able to make a 100 thousand s cut reducing the diameter about two hundred thousands so for my boring I started out with this smaller boring bar here this is a three quarter inch diameter and it has that same cn geometry cutter in here but just a smaller scale this is one I've been using for a while I've had for a while but once I got that hole punched out a little bit bigger I switched over to this one-inch boring bar that again has that same CMG cutter than I'm using over there a bit a little bit bigger cutter so the you know smaller boring bar obviously I punched a one-inch hole in there so I wasn't able to get this one into the hole right away it's had to start out with a smaller boring bar but just really about as quick as I can I like to go to the larger-diameter boring bar because it just gives you more rigidity and it's going to have less flexing the tools and you can it's just going to work better so I always try to use the largest boring bar that I can now for the parting operations I was using this Elora sub parting tool holder that's just got a high speed steel or actually this is cobalt here cutting a parting tool and that just goes right up in there and slices it off you can get these with inserts as well and eventually I'll probably get a one that I can put an insert in that will fit into this holder but for right now I'm just using the high speed steel so anyway that's just a little bit about the tooling we used over there and I'm really tickled to have been able to finally you know get upgraded in my tooling size here to something a little bit more appropriate for the machine that I'm working on as for the parts we're making you can see now I've got four of these so we again we board that inside diameter so that it would fit on the shafting that we'll be using there we go have a little burr on there so that's going to fit onto the shaft that way and then we'll take another one and I put on this in and basically what this will do is this is made this inside diameter here is the same diameter of the little bearing caps and this was basically just sitting to the bottom of that bearing cap and then the outside diameter is just to may form a dam to keep the Babbitt from pouring out so we'll do this on both ends of the shafts and basically what these are going to do is it's going to serve as a jig that will go ahead and position my shaft right into those bearing caps or bearing shells so that my shaft will be held in the proper position and then I can then pour the Babbitt around them so this is now ready to go so let's go on out to the Machine and we'll go ahead and get the shaft set up and get ready to start pouring some Babbitt I've got the shaft kind of dummied up mounted on the machine out here now so you can see how these spacers are working or these little jigs are working so that lip fits on the inside of the bearing shell the shafts going through it and of course the outside you see is damming up against the outside so the Babbitt can't pour our flow out of there when it's in a molten state so and then at the same time it's holding the shaft in the proper position which is about halfway into that bearing shell for this for the Barrett for the Babbitt to go in so this is exactly what we're after our shaft is now installed in the machine and you know this is everything just like we want it so now we're going to go ahead and start getting everything prepped for the Babbitt port now that we have everything dry fitted together make sure everything's going to work now we want us to really start getting the shaft prepped for the Babbitt pour so before I do that though let me just mention down here on the bearing shells where we will be pouring the Babbitt into I've cleaned those up I've taken a wire brush I've tried to get them as clean as possible we've got the little holes drilled into the shell itself that will the Babbitt will flow into and keep it from turning and we show that in the last video those are just some little keys to keep that bevel from turning in there so that's already down there so now what I want to do is I want to take on the shaft itself I'm going to take the acetylene torch and I'm going to smoke the shaft with just carbon soot and the reason I'm going to do that is is that once the Babbitt cools we want to have some type of release agent on the shaft itself so that it's not going to stick to the the actual shaft we want it to stick to the bearing shelter we don't want to to stick here so the an old timers trick that I've always learned is just take your settling torch don't have any oxygen running where you got good smoke going on it and just put a good coat of carbon on there and that will give you a good fire proof just material between the Babbitt and the shaft itself so that it will come apart a little bit easier so I've got my torch ready we're going to go ahead and blacken or smoke these the shafts and get them a so ready to go and turn my gas on first all right now that I have my gas turned on this side to work a little better so I turned that flame back to where it's just barely coming out and I got a lot of smoke coming off of it and I'm just going to run that across the shaft and that's going to put the carbon on it it's works better when the winds not blowing like this so there you see the the carbon blacking on the shaft and that's just what we're looking for and now we're going to position the shaft back in now we have the shaft and spacers all in place the next step here is we want to actually put a little bit more damning material in here to make sure that we don't get any of that molten Babbitt pouring out around these spacers while the space for themselves should do a pretty good job of holding the Babbitt back that's not a machined surface and it's fitting in it's not a super tight fit in there so I'm going to add some more damning material and what I'm going to use is this material here is it's called Babbitt right and this is made for pouring Babbitt it's just a play-doh type consistency you can roll it in your hands get a string of it going step 5 god is pretty old and it's starting to get a little stiff you can use reuse it over and over again but it's a heatproof material back in the old days it actually had asbestos in it but the more modern stuff is bestest free and I know that I bought this almost I probably had this 10 or 15 years but probably 11 or 12 years I guess but I know this is some new material unfortunately the makers who were making Babbitt right have quit making this and it's no longer available so I'm going to have to find a new material because I really need to get some more this stuff in for doing Babbitt courses like I said this stuff is just getting old but let's get that a little bit thinner that's probably fine so all I'm going to do is I'm just going to wrap this around the edge there and I will just use this to make a really good seal around between the bearing shell in my spacers that I made and I'll do this on all of them and again that's just to make sure that I don't have any Babbitt escape and come out around this joint I'm also going to put something around the shaft itself here that's just another place that the Babbitt can come out that's a pretty tight fit in there I don't think it would come through there but it's easier to put this stuff on and not worry about it so now I've got a good seal all the way around that between the spacer which will serve as a dam and then the Babbitt right as a backup dam I should be able to contain my Babbitt material in the shell where I want it when I pour so we're ready now to start putting some heat on some of these parts so let's get our torch it up lit up here and get going so got the torch going come on do is come down here and turn on this so and on the stove I have I have a ladle with my Babbitt in it and uh go ahead just kind of preheat that with the court as well and we'll get this started melting so the Babbitt that I'm using today is a 10 base Babbitt Babbitt comes in a couple of different types really where there's a lot of different kinds of Babbitt out there but they all really kind of boil down into two basic pipe there's a thin base Babbitt in a lid based average and of course Babbitt is an alloy a lot of different metals youth as a bearing material actually a very good very material but when you're buying Babbitt for machine you need to look at how fast the shaft is if you're going to be operating to decide which type of Babbitt to use this is the fairly slow turning fab life a slow turning I'm saying probably up to a couple of thousand rpm you can use the lab they fed it which is much cheaper to buy but when you start getting into high speed application such as a cutter head on a jointer or a planer like you have over here you need to use a hen base CIN the metal Babbitt and the pin-based Babbitt is actually rated for higher fee staff so today what we were using on this shaft is actually a thin base Babbitt I had previously melted it down which is why I thought in the ingot but I do know exactly what is here alright that started the melting there we're just going to let that go and while I'm working on that or while that's melting over there I'm going to start putting some heat on the bearing shell and the shaft it's kind of slowly heating this up but that back to the Babbitt itself for what we're using here is a product called adamant my Magnolia metals company are still in business you can still order this and - the material that we're using for Babbitt today which is a tin base Babbitt - high speed application all right what I'm doing now is I'm just putting some heat on the bearing shell on the shaft the goal here is is I want to get some warmth in these it does not have to be red-hot it does not have to be really all it needs to be as a couple hundred degrees babbitt by itself will melt Oh anywhere I'm have to lift up the specs on this it's probably going to be around seven or eight hundred degrees is where this material is going to melt out so the goal here is just to get some heat into these tabs into the shaft in the shell just so that when I pour the hot metal in there it's not going to cool and solidify real fast just right on contact so again the goal is not to get it red hot the goal is just to get some heat into it all so it doesn't cool the Babbitt too quickly as we're up as for doing the pour one question that I was half prior to doing this was was I going to ten the actual bearing cell and I'm not doing that and what the question was about is you can take a material and actually coat the inside of the bearing shell with ten and what that does is it allows the Babbitt to stick to the shell better because these shells have the little key holes drilled into them that's going to grip that Babbitt is really not as necessary to Kin them as if he had a real smooth step so a lot of times in automotive applications in particular where Babis views on like crank shafts they will tend those because they're actually pouring the Babbitt into a machined surface and it can slide and clip in that very easily you need to have something for it to stick to but again in this application it's not necessary and we're not going to put any pen on these so as this Babbitt is warming up and heating up it starts getting molten and what will happen is you'll get some impurities that will come up on the top of the surface and you just want to skim those off so I'm just using a little pine stick here and we're just going to take this and just kind of throw that right out onto the ground where it's not going to hurt anything the skimming material there now we need to get the Babbitt and the ladles heated up to the proper temperature and I don't have any kind of fancy the momment or anything to do that but an old-timers trick is again just use a PI n stick and when you stick it down in there and it starts to char the stick your Babbitt is hot enough so it's not quite charring the stick yet so we're going to continue letting that heat up and I'll also continue just kind of skimming the top there to get those impurities off I got some heat in the shafts now I'm going to let this heat up a little bit more and get it closer to pouring temperature then I'll real quickly throw just a little bit more heat on the shafts again and then we'll do the pour while this continues to heat up just a little bit more about Babbitt Babbitt bearings have been around for a long time Isak baton fat excuse me Isaac Babbitt kind of invented the materials back in the I get think was in late 1800s I'll look that up and put it up on the screen to make sure I'm telling you correctly but it was used as a bearing material and all this is a soft metal that when you put all on it they all the the shaft is actually running on a layer of oil on top of this soft metal and it works very good as a bearing material of course in the early to mid 1900s ball bearings started replacing Babbitt and a lot of application as they became more available but even today we still use Babbitt in a lot of situations where you have a particularly a shaft running or own sown something in also in very large applications I've been told that's still on a lot of ships that are being made now we have a really big propeller shaft and you need a very solid bearing material they're still using Babbitt in those applications I've heard they so use it in a powered dams or hydroelectric plants and the big generators where the it's just too big for a ball bearing Babbitt still using those applications and even some precision lathes are used with Babbitt or sometimes they use bronze in those now because with ball bearings as the shaft is rotating you actually get a little bit of vibration in that shaft whereas in a good tight Babbitt bearing you get a very smooth running shaft with very little vibration at all so it actually still has applications and uses today but of course the downside the Babbitt is is that it does require a little bit of care and feeding you have to take care of those those bearings you have to keep them old you have to make sure they're properly adjusted and you know most people don't want to fool with that and really that the convenience factor was probably the main reason people started going to ball bearings in a lot of situations so let's check the temperature again we're getting real close it's starting to char the wood here a little bit so we're going to probably skim this one more time and put some more heat on our shaft and we'll be ready to pour these bearings all right here we go ladle full of hot babbit coming oops filled a little bit there all right that one's done now we'll put some heat on the other side on the other shaft and get that one for all right we're going to just let that cool now and we'll come back after a hour - I'm going to go grab some lunch and pull that out and see how it did we let that cool for about an hour and 15 minutes and pulled the shaft and see we got a very nice clean bottom bearing here this is on the left side of the machine and over on the right hand side machine same thing we got a real nice clean bearing shell there on the bottom so now we're going to clean up the tops and I get ready to pour at the top half all right how to get you guys in here you can see it's kind of awkward work on the machine just real tight quarters in here but we got a little bit of babbit that kind of spilled over the top of the of the casting someone try to clean this up now if I can push it off scrape it off like this it makes it a little bit easier to get cleaned up but sometimes I'm going to have to follow that let me go grab a little hammer I can tap that alright now I'm just going to take a pre-course wrap the ball just top of this down we just want that to be flush with the top of the bearing cap and that looks pretty good let's get the other side now next step here and getting ready to pour the Babbitt in the top of these top halves these caps is going to be to get some shims made to go between the two pieces and the reason we want to put shims in there's assets Babbitt wears you can always pull some of that material some pull some of those shims out and tighten these bearings up over time you can use a lot of different materials for making these shims as I've taken old machines apart and all bearings apart I've seen all kinds of materials from cereal boxes cardboard just you name it sometimes you'll see metal shims put in there typically what I like to use is just plain gasket paper I like gasket paper because you can buy it in different thicknesses and it is somewhat heat resistant so that when you're pouring the bearing you don't have to really worry about the material catching on fire I'm burning up because again the molten Babbitt is only it's less than a thousand degrees and most of this material will withstand heats at that temperature for at least a short period of time until it cools off and the other thing I like about gasket paper is is that it's fairly easy to cut it in to get it to the shape and that you want so what I want to do is I'm just going to lay a piece on here and I'm going to let this stick over the edge just a little bit because I want that to come up to the shaft in the bearing cap there and to get the shape that I want I'm just going to use a ball peen hammer and just kind of go around the outside of this just tap around it and you will see an imprint on the other side here that shows the shape of the of what you're doing so and then I will I'm just going to take a pair of scissors and just kind of rough this out you can actually tap on it enough of the hammer that it will it will just tear off to that shape and sometimes I'll do that but for right now I think I'm just going to use the scissors now they got the shape on there so now I've got a piece that matches that shape there I need to get the hole in there so again you know just tap it with the ball-peen hammer and as you see it just comes right out so and now I've got a shim that's made to fit this right here without any problem so I'm going to make several of those now and we'll go both these down and get them ready to pour you pulled the top bearings off now and clean them up so start off this was the one that was on the right side of the machine we got a good pour on it I did have a few air bubbles in the top here that's typical when you're pouring the top bearing just because there's there's no place for the the gases and steam and everything it's coming off of that to go except out of the pour hole and a lot of times we get some air bubbles in the top it's no big deal because you actually need some recesses in the top of the bearing anywhere as an all reservoir in fact we're going to be putting scratching in some grooves and earrings as well later on so I'm not worried about that at all that's a like I said actually really pretty good because it gives you an oil reservoir now the one that is giving us some trouble though is the first bearing I poured and I noted on the video there where the the dam had leaked and we were getting some Babbitt pouring out and I was able to get it to pour solid but I had to stop and repack it so basically what ended up with was two layers of Babbitt in this shell where it had done the first one of them it kind of got hard and then we poured another layer on top of that and I really don't like that kind of a situation that happens from time to time we just don't get a good dam and anyway that that's typically a bad thing to happen in a Babbitt port when I pulled it out I was really kind of surprised because I had a really nice-looking bearing surface in there but as I was cleaning it up I put the file on there and I actually broke this piece out so it was real thin right there where I had the bottom layer and the top layer on top of it so what we're going to do with this one is this a mess up and we're just going to melt that Babbitt out we'll reset it up and we'll repour this one bearing cap here that's the really the nice thing about Babbitt is that it is very forgiving if you make a mistake or you get a bad pour you know all you've lost us some time you just go in there melt it out and start over so we're going to go we'll melt this out set it back up on the machine and hopefully get a good pour on the second try so the first step here is we're going to melt this old babbitt out so i'm just going to melt it right into the ladle there and we'll get the stove going to start melting this so let's get the torch lit and we'll just nut that right out and now we're going to smoke the shaft and get it ready to go as well and just like before we'll just use the torch and put a layer of carbon on there and that's probably good and get the shaft position back in here so put a couple of shims in the back put a couple of shims in the front slide just a bearing cap in here and get some bolts in there all right that's ready to put some heat on we got a good dam on there put the heat on these bearing shells and I think we'll be ready to pour hmm alright this time we got a much better pour still got it a little bit of an air pocket down here in the bottom of the Bering but again that's not going to be a problem because that's just going to be able to serve as an oil reservoir so I'm going to take this and just kind of clean this one up and get it ready to go on the machine alrighty that's pretty much ready to go now like I said we got a little gap right there but that's going to be real good the old hole is going to come in right there and I'll give us a reservoir on the top all right we're just about ready to start getting those just start on the scraping but I want to show you these scraper tools that I use for bat bearings these are just some miscellaneous scrapers that I've picked up over the years at different places but as you can see it's kind of a curved shape here and it has a good striping edge on the side there and we'll get in here and scrape these bearings this is just another so triangular scraper here that comes in handy as well but anyway these are babbitt scrapers or scrapers in general but very often we use for Babbitt and I've got a collection of probably I don't know probably about ten of these different sizes and shapes or whatever that I have put together over the years that they use for scraping Babbitt so I've gone ahead and drilled the oil hole through the cap and into the bottom and as you can see these holes in here would just serve as a holes our old grooves but now we're just going to take these uh scrapers and and get this to stay in the vise and just I'm just going to real gingerly just kind of scrape off the high points in this bearing shell I'm really not trying to do a whole lot of scraping right now I'm just trying to really just get those high spots knocked off and then we'll go put put it on the shaft on the machine and tighten it down and see how it feels but again I'm just trying to knock the hot spots off and I use a couple of different strikers for this that's going to be a good starting point all right we're through with this babbitt pouring job forgive me I've basically on the bottom shells I went in and scrape them about like I did the top ones it's just so tight down in here I just didn't have room to get a camera in there to show you guys that part of it but basically the same process I just did some light scraping on them I then put my shaft in and did a couple of test fits tighten them down and doing a little bit more scraping you know in a high-speed shaft this shaft here is not really going to be turning all that terribly fast but like on the cutterhead shaft what I would do is I would actually take the time to really get it scraped in super well by going in and using some bluing finding the high spots and trying to get about 70 to 80% contact surface area in there and when we get to doing the cutterhead Babbitt's over here I will show you the process of really taking the time to get it scraped in well on these again it's a fairly slow turning shaft it's not as critical so you know if you got 50 60 % contacting that shaft you're going to be fine and the Babbitt will bear we're in overtime as well so anyway we got everything on there just clamp down there put some oil in the journals I've got the pulleys and everything and the gears on here now and it turns very easily but yet there's no movement in the shaft I mean I'm pulling on this and I can't feel any SAP movement in there which is exactly what we want but this is going to work real well you can see everything is geared up here and it's actually turning the feed rollers on both sides as well so and of course this pulley here is my loose pulley and as we talked about before there's actually be a little shifting fork here that will shift the belt from when these pulleys to the other and if it's running on the loose pulley of course the belts running but it's not engaged but then this pulley over here on the backside is tightened up on the shaft and when you shift the pulley over there the shaft starts turning and your feed works engage so that pretty much wraps up the babbitt touring for this shaft i've still got some more babbitt to pour on this machine so you'll likely see a few more videos on this subject as we move along it's not rocket science folks it's pretty low-tech technology to be honest with you and it's really quite simple to do this you know if you got a machine that has about bearings on it the first thing I tell you is number one don't be scared of it with those Babbitt bearings properly adjusted and maintained that machine is not something that you just want to discard just because it has about bearings I see that a lot people say well I don't want that machine because it doesn't have ball bearings there's nothing to be scared off about but with a bit bearings you just need to make sure you keep them old and may have to do a little bit of adjusting to them in most cases a machine even has worn babbitt bearings you can just take them apart take some shims out do some scraping and not even have to repour the bearings like we did here but even if you do it's not a very difficult process and you know it's another another thing as you saw here it's not a one time do all or die I mean you if you mess it up you just melt it out and start over again so the first time I poured about it barons I think it took me three tries to get one that that looked good or that I was happy with but you know with practice like anything else it gets easier and easier so anyway there's your process I'm going to go ahead and paint everything up down here all the raw metal in here so it doesn't start rusting and you know we're quickly making progress on this machine now I'm not sure exactly what my next step will be I will tell you guys that this coming week again just I'm going to be travelling a good bit so I'm headed out of town later this week going to be gone this coming weekend actually this weekend I'm I'm headed up to a friend of Mines house up in North Georgia he has a little home machine shop and we're having a little gathering of a bunch of friends up there mostly people over on the old woodworking machines for them so we're going to have a little get-together at Mike's place and I'm going to take the video camera launders going to be all kinds of neat projects going on up there and I'm going to try to shoot some videos stuff we're doing up at his place and don't be surprised if you see some of those show up here in a week or two but when I leave there I'm actually got to fly back out to California for a meeting at work and I'll be out there most of next week so it's probably going to be another really two weeks before I can get anything put back up on on my channel but so bear with me hang with me and we'll look forward to seeing you guys for you people who are just recent subscribers thank you for subscribing to all my subscribers thank you comments keep them coming I read every one guys I don't have time to reply to each and every one of them but if you have a question or something like that I will try to get back to you on the comments so I enjoy reading your comments even though I may not reply to every one of them so keep that up as well so thank you for watching thank you for being here and we'll get another video up as soon as possible thanks

Channel: Keith Rucker - VintageMachinery.org

Views: 323,911

Rating: 4.8806396 out of 5

Keywords: Babbitt Bearings, Babbit, J. A. Vance, Georgia Museum of Agriculture, Machine Shop, Machinist, OWWM, Lodge & Shipley, Metal Lathe, Babbitrite

Id: 4v2ivoLkxVw

Length: 55min 34sec (3334 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 18 2014