It was fairly clean although the previous owner hinted that it had sat in a barn/shed for about 6 yrs. There was some clay on the feet indicating that it may have sat on a dirt floor. When I first got it home I realized that the tailstock center does not align vertically with the headstock - I believe its off by about 25 thousandths of an inch or there abouts. Because the lathe had sat around a shed for a long time and because its also sat in my woodworking shop for a year uncovered it needs a good cleaning and check out before I put it into service. I plan on getting my wife to sew me a cover to throw over it and also one for my mill.
The first step in stripping it down was to take off the front sheet metal cover and remove the drawers. You can see the accumulated dust and grim of a year of sitting around.
I then used Citris Strip to strip off the first 3 layers of paint - various shades of gray. I took the 4.5" Makita mini-grinder with a wire wheel to remove the loosened off paint. The final layer was a dark gray/black and was a pain to strip off. I blasted the cabinet off with a pressure washer I borrowed form a friend. It required a separate coating of Citris Strip and a lot of elbow grease to get the bulk of that layer off I sanded out any remaining paint - feathering it out with 80 grit on my random orbital sander.
I tried to spray the cabinet with a small spray gun my dad gave me when he was over a week ago. But the paint specs said don't thin (Benjamin Moore P22 Urethane Alkyd Enamel) and it wouldn't spray at all. Then I tried to paint with a brush on the inside of the cabinet and that just did not work. Did a bit more reasearch and went ahead and thinned the paint and got it to spray out of the paint gun though it required a higher amount of pressure and filled the garage with overspray. Ugghh. Did I ever say I hate painting. I did just the bottom of the cabinet so that I could flip it over later and do the sides and top without worrying about the hard to reach areas. I wound up sanding a lot of it off a few days later to get rid of brush strokes and some runs.
I then disassembled the underdrive, degreased (soaked in Purple Power), stripped (Citris Strip) and cleaned all the parts up - another good use of the pressure washer (them things are handy).
On Saturday I took everything outside and painted what I had ready:
Cabinet
Drawers
Underdrive
My friend loaned me a nice Binks Mach S1 HVLP spray gun which was a pleasure to use.. though I have to admit I'm still no painting genius. I wound up putting a whole canister of paint on the cabinet and another half canister on the rest of the sheet metal and drawers. Basically a really heavy coat. This time I did it outside and the HVLP gun was set for only 15lbs pressure. The overspray dropped like a rock around the cabinet onto plastic I had laid out. The cabinet and drawers turned out awesome!
You can see the five gallon cans I had the cabinet sitting on - I had already taken it inside before I remembered to take a picture. I used two step ladders with my long pipe clamp pipes as supports for hanging the drawers and smaller pieces on. After spraying the drawers and sheet metal I did the smaller cast pieces with just a brush. It didn't look too bad after the second coat of brush on but I have a lot of places to clean off the paint. I think I need to get a better brush before I do much more.
I cleaned up the motor and gave it a shot of black gloss paint on Sunday afternoon. It came out looking really nice (sorry no picture).
I need to clean up the surfaces that shouldn't have gotten paint this week and then I need to reassemble the under drive and put it back into the cabinet. Then I'll be ready to start tackling the lathe itself.
