Rebuilding South Bend Heavy 10 - Part II

I've been working on the rebuild of my South Bend heavy 10 lathe for a few weeks now. Saturday I completed what I'll term phase I.

Phase I included:

1. Remove lathe from cabinet
2. Remove under drive and electrics from cabinet
3. Strip, clean and paint cabinet
4. Disassembel, strip, clean and paint under drive components
5. Reassemble under drive (replace bearing on cone pulley shaft)
6. Reinstall under drive
7. Blow up old motor (okay that wasn't planned - got some paint into the motor and it just won't work.
8. Install new motor, rewire everything using flexible conduit that is coated in pvc for sealing against oil and grease.
9. Put it all back together - fit door to catches properly, assemble drawer locks
10. Retouch paint where needed.

Here is a picture of the completed cabinet and under drive at the end of phase I. I still need to put on the knobs on the drawer locks - didn't want to close the drawers all the way as I did some paint touchup on them Saturday evening.

Phase II will entail the following:

1. Disassemble the lathe into major units
2. Disassemble, clean and strip the head stock, gear box, carriage, bed and other major castings.
3. Paint these major pieces

Yesterday I started to disassemble the main lathe components. I got my sons to help me get it back up on the bench using the motor hoist then I began to disassemble major components off of it.  I began by removing the carriage, then the headstock and associated covers and finally the gear box and lead screw. While I had the leadscrew bearing off the end I supported the leadscrew with several pieces of 2x4 under it so that when I slid the carriage off the end that I didn't wind up bending or putting stress on the lead screw.

Here is the lathe just after putting it on the bench before starting disassembly. Most of the pictures I took during disassembly were images about position of various pieces and screws etc. 

Here are a few shots of the major pieces as they came off the lathe:

With the major assemblies set aside I proceeded to begin to strip the paint from the bed and various head stock covers using Citris Strip.

After a lot of elbow grease and several coats of Citris Strip and visits with the pressure washer over the last two nights. I now have the bed, bed feet, headstock castings, gear box assembly, all the covers and other odds and ends stripped clean. Here are some pictures of the stripped and cleaned parts. I've coated the ways in WD 40 to prevent rust and did similar things with the gear box and head stock casting - especially in bearing journals and scraped surfaces.

Here is the headstock casting and journal caps as well as the spindle. I don't currently own a gear puller so I can't take the gear off the end of the spindle in order to fully disassemble. I'l lhave to stop a TSC tomorrow after work and get one.

Here is the gear box with 95% of the paint stripped off of it. I removed the plate with the gear chart prior to stripping the paint as I didn't want to lose the paint on that plate. It was a simple process of taking an old  1/4" chisel  (bevel side up) and carefully tapping it under the pin to raise it slightly then grabbing the pins with a small pair of side cutters and giving a slight turn. They popped right out. Whole process took about 3 min. Thanks to the guys on the South Bend forum for the technique.

I cleaned the gear box first by soaking overnight in a solution of Purple Power though I'm not certain how much it really helped. Then I covered it in Citris Strip and let it sit for a half hour then blasted it off with the pressure washer. Then more Citris Strip and a second round of presssure washing. Then I spent half an hour sitting with it tipped partially into an ice cream pail with mineral spirits and washed and rewashed the gears with a paint brush.  I'm now at a crossroads as I try to figure out whether I really need to fully disassemble the gear box. I'd like to because I want to ensure all the bearing surfaces are clean but I've heard these single tumbler gear boxes can be a nightmare to disassemble and reassemble.  Waiting on some advice from the South Bend forum before I proceed.

Here are some of the other parts that have been striped. I have to hit a few with the wire wheel to get rid of the surface rust. You can see some of the parts are aluminum - gear covers. Which really surprised me. I figured they'd all be cast iron.

Well that's it for this post.

Rebuilding my south bend heavy 10 Part I

I bought a South Bend heavy 10 lathe a year ago in May. I finally got the time to start rebuilding it two weeks ago. The first picture is of the lathe as it appeared just after I got it.

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 removed the lathe and dropped the motor and underdrive.

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.