long term atlas 10f lathe restoration/modification

[Henrik]

I think the belt is on backwards Henrik.

My Atlas also had a wobbly back-plate. I un-bolted the chuck from it and turned it true in place on the spindle.

I see what you mean, doh! Turned one belt around and will do when I get a chance

Do check that the threads in the chuck and those on th spindle are totally clean and don't have any dings on them . Also check the register collar on the shaft and the face of the register on the chuck for tiny dings If you have a reasonable face plate ,

...

In one of them he uses two morse taper mandrels an MT 3 in the hed stock & an MT 2 in the tailstock ( I think Ive put the correct sizes down ???) ending in a Jacobs taper to fit drill chucks on to check the trueness of the tail stock alignment after resetting . They are dirt cheap Chinese one's , fairly well finished from RG . My set of both sizes cost me about £9 inc p&p

Good idea about the mandrels - must get some


Also got a clock on the spindle today and the good news is that the run out is 0.01mm (0.0004") in the z axis, and about 0.005mm (0.0002") in the x axis

Also no clock movement when I grab the spindle and try to push it sideways and up/down, so it definitely looks like the spindle and bearings are fine

 

[DAPPH]

Run the motor after the daily lubrication process has been done for a couple of hours to warm things up then check for any play /run-out again .

You could do worse that use a new green plastic scotch bright pad & some meths on the spindle thread & register to get rid of that rusty looking crud .. " Every little helps " apparently.

My lathe was like yours on the head stock shaft ,after about 20 min and the use of white spirit on a second pad it came up like new .
I also polished the inside of the spindle , first using a white spirit dipped long bottle brush to soak the inside ,then pushing cut up Scotchbrite pads in from the rear end, one after another till it looked clean , then I used an oiled cloth and a wooden rod push to polish it .

Now I push a bit of soft sponge in at the chuck end and push it out with a made up weighted mandril /taper removing knocking stick every time I change the chuck or want to use the facility of the hollow tapered shaft. It certainly stops crud moving back through the hollow shaft and getting to the gear train or in the rear bearing .

Luckily there were no burrs or scores on the inside of the shaft
.

One thing I have noticed recently is that because I didn't know where to get a non detergent 20/30 oil to lube the bed etc. , I used a high grade part synthetic detergent oil for diesel engines .( had a gallon of it spare ) over the period of this last year I noticed it had become gummy and was starting to glue up the ways by the chuck as well as starting to drag /hold on to even the slightest of chips or dust making cleaning the lathe a bit tiresome some days.

I found that Machine Mart sells non detergent compressor oil of a close viscosity so instead of paying £6.50 or so plus Vat a litre bottle I got a 5 litre can for something like £20 inc vat . After cleaning all the ways etc on the lathe and refilling my oil can with the compressor oil I gave the lathe a normal daily lube up..
Ye gods a fortnight later of daily lubes it slips & slides like everything is floating on air and it has quietened down in the pulley spindle tremendously . There is no hint of stickiness that there was with the detergent oil and best of all because of that it cleans up like a dream .

 

[Henrik]

Dapph, good shout on the compressor oil. I've started using the same now

As mentioned on this thread http://www.mig-welding.co.uk/forum/threads/lathe-vs-cast-iron.57462/ I had some problems machining the back plate, but getting there slowly.

To get the lathe up to a stage where it could actually cut anything has been a bit of a process.

I had to get myself another tool post as I had nothing that would fit tool height wise, and once I managed to find one on ebay that wasn't outrageously expensive, the T-nuts that would fit the slot in the compound slide had too big a thread, so the bar wouldn't go through the tool post. Ended up bodging a tool post stud by grinding a piece of flat bar, drilling a 10mm hole and welding an m10 rod into it.

Oh, and the garage gnome has walked off with my shims, so I had to improvise to raise the tool enough:

All in all, I'm thrilled at having got to this stage Only a bit more machining to do, and then at least I'll have a chuck that runs reasonably true, which means I'll be able to sort out a proper tool post stud, and start building the other bits required to fit a lead screw etc.

In fact, I'm so confident this old project will become a lathe at some point that I've listed my drummond lathe on ebay

 

[DAPPH]

I have the original lantern tool post that came with my lathe & I'm hanging on to it for there will be some jobs one day that will require all the composite movements you can get with it.


Is that an old Mycroft tool post you've fitted .. ? I too have one that I purchased . 10 mm bright steel flat bar makes a briliant packing strip if you either drill it out for the centre bolt or cut a slot to the hole to make it a quick removal piece.

Some nerk had used a bog standard headed high tensile bolt in the mounting T slot to try and hold an even earlier over centre Myford tool clamp and pulled shoulders of the soft cast up so much that teh new block tool post like yours sat on the cross slide and pirouetted like a bleeding ballet dancer because I could not get enough grip between the post and the slide .. I wondered why my bar bored holes were coming out as cones in 2 " thick aluminium.

After filing , using engineers blue and scraping the top of the cross slide I now have a rock solid platform to mount my tools in . What a massive difference it has made .
After a few months of frequently playing on the lathe once I done the first " double de gunge " and setting up , I found it necessary to reset all the gibs correctly to stop things slapping around. Everything is now as smooth as silk and my accuracy in lathe work has benefited no end.

A few weeks later I bored out the center of the tool post so I can add a bigger center clamping bolt , I turned a groove in the bottom end of the stud so it only just slips in the T slot and made a precision flat plate mounting on the lathe that fits the bottom slot so well I got big headed and felt proud it was such a quality bit of fitting as it fits when inverted or back to from and back to front inverted with out any noticeable play . I also made a new clamping nut to suit the new bar and added an angled handle to it to save me messing around with spanners .

I have purchased a new QCTP and two extra tool holders ..... I should have got six more for I'm still finding I need to swap things about and recheck the tip heights.

I also got a set of 9 indexable cutting tools , they didn't perform as well as I'd been led to believe they would, so I ended up buying a cheap £19 set of brazed tungsten tips from Machine Mart and ground them up to my feelings & thoughts on a skanky low quality 30 yr old grinder I have .. They cut brilliantly .

 

[penfold]

One thing I have noticed recently is that because I didn't know where to get a non detergent 20/30 oil to lube the bed etc. , I used a high grade part synthetic detergent oil for diesel engines .( had a gallon of it spare ) over the period of this last year I noticed it had become gummy and was starting to glue up the ways by the chuck as well as starting to drag /hold on to even the slightest of chips or dust making cleaning the lathe a bit tiresome some days.

I found that Machine Mart sells non detergent compressor oil of a close viscosity so instead of paying £6.50 or so plus Vat a litre bottle I got a 5 litre can for something like £20 inc vat . After cleaning all the ways etc on the lathe and refilling my oil can with the compressor oil I gave the lathe a normal daily lube up..
Ye gods a fortnight later of daily lubes it slips & slides like everything is floating on air and it has quietened down in the pulley spindle tremendously . There is no hint of stickiness that there was with the detergent oil and best of all because of that it cleans up like a dream .

Why not use proper way oil? It doesn't cost any more and it doesn't run off the bed nearly as quick.

 

[DAPPH]

Why not use proper way oil? It doesn't cost any more and it doesn't run off the bed nearly as quick.

I can't seem to find it within a 50 mile radius in tool shops , truthfully it does not appear to " run off " either .

Do you have the details of yours that you can put on th site .. I can then try and look it up /source some.

 

[Pete.]

The Atlas 10 has an unhardened bed. It needs proper way oil if you want it to last, lighter oil hasn't the tackifiers you find in way oil. I don't think that you can safely claim that light oil flushes the bed clean either. If you pour contaminated oil out of any container there will always be those extra-fine particles that have fallen out of suspension and stuck to the bottom. It might shift some but the real damaging bits are those fine stuff. None of it is helped by the flat ways that the Atlas has.

 

[Henrik]

Cut a register today, and mounted up the 3 jaw chuck:

I think the register might be 0.001 - 0.002 too big still, as it was very tight to get on there.

How deep does the register need to be? At the moment, it's about 1mm, but I'm not sure if that's deep enough.

 

[Pete.]

You don't need it that tight, in fact John Stevenson put forward the idea that you cut the radial register slightly undersize so that you can loosen the chuck mount bolts and bump the chucked part into running true. Apparently it's a method used for setting centreless grinders.

 

[Henrik]

You don't need it that tight, in fact John Stevenson put forward the idea that you cut the radial register slightly undersize so that you can loosen the chuck mount bolts and bump the chucked part into running true. Apparently it's a method used for setting centreless grinders.

Ah, good to know. Will redo

Any thoughts on the depth of the register?

 

[DAPPH]

The Atlas 10 has an unhardened bed. It needs proper way oil if you want it to last, lighter oil hasn't the tackifiers you find in way oil. I don't think that you can safely claim that light oil flushes the bed clean either. If you pour contaminated oil out of any container there will always be those extra-fine particles that have fallen out of suspension and stuck to the bottom. It might shift some but the real damaging bits are those fine stuff. None of it is helped by the flat ways that the Atlas has.

Pete, in the MOLO that I have that is the original book that came with the lathe when it was released from government war stock in 1945 for the Atlas lathes range , my machine is part American Atlas and part British Sphere from about the year 1943 it recommends that you thoroughly flush the ways with paraffin after grinding steel , cutting cast iron or brass then wipe dry . Once it's clean ( I suppose it could take several flushes & dries with a clean lint free cloth ) only then do you re lube with an SAE 10 motor oil or equivalent ( page seven items 5, 9 10,14,15 & 28 refers) .. in those days of 1940 I don't think the idea of using a detergent oil had arrived ..that came in with greater usage of diesel oil .

There is mention of Pyroil ...a trade name of oil that was used when running bearings & engines consisting of one part Pyroil to four parts SAE10. I seem to remember that back in my apprentice days nearly all cars with new or recon engines used to display a running in please pass label in the back window & that the oil was a much thinner one than the one used after the initial 100 mile change & the 500 mile service & oil change ( Ye gods am I that old ....it was over half a century ago ?? ).

I know that the SAE system ( Standard American Engineering system )of classification involved a pint or gallon tank of oil at a set temperature giving so many drips in one minute through a certain sized hole in the bottom and the number of drips per minute directly corresponded with SAE number .

You use the word " Tackifiers " .. you'll have to tell me what that's all about ,for I've always understood that the idea is to lightly lubricate , float off and/or flush the crud safely away , not to get it to stick as minute particles suspended in the oil and grind the bed ?

 

[DAPPH]

Cut a register today, and mounted up the 3 jaw chuck:

I think the register might be 0.001 - 0.002 too big still, as it was very tight to get on there.

How deep does the register need to be? At the moment, it's about 1mm, but I'm not sure if that's deep enough.

Use engineers blue ( EB ) very lightly smeared on it and see if there are any high spots on the register and on the inside of the mounting that can be scraped down with the back of a ground up hacksaw blade .
If you don't have E B then get a small glob of the oily ink out of a ball point /Biro pen or a refill and mix it with a little cold cream ladies face muck stuff or zinc & castor oil baby's bum cream Z&C is best ) and use that instead .

 

[Pete.]

Dapph you misunderstand me what I'm saying is that it's not reasonable to expect using a light oil as way lube instead of proper way oil to be an improvement in the hope that it will continuously clean the crud off the ways. If your machine has no way wipers, you need to clean it manually. How diligent you are will be reflected in the rate of wear in the bed and the Atlas is very susceptible because the bed is comparatively soft. Way oil is always the best oil to use on a way.

 

[DAPPH]

Gotcha Pete , thanks .

Can you give me the UK brand names for your " way oil " & where you get it from please ?
Any info such as the SAE number would also be helpful.

I made new carriage way wipers and put small bits in the cup oilers on the cross shat to slow down the rate of oil run though out of Dr Scholl medical felt corn plasters .

Dave

 

[DAPPH]

Use engineers blue ( EB ) very lightly smeared on it and see if there are any high spots on the register and on the inside of the mounting that can be scraped down with the back of a ground up hacksaw blade .
If you don't have E B then get a small glob of the oily ink out of a ball point /Biro pen or a refill and mix it with a little cold cream ladies face muck stuff or zinc & castor oil baby's bum cream Z&C is best ) and use that instead .

If it's not too tight perhaps try using a few drops of well shaken liquid BRASSO on the threads & register and work it back and forth as though tightening & un tightening the plate on the shaft.

I've used it several times to polish the action of full bore caliber rifles when I was heavily into shooting & also to polish the threads on my head stock shaft & chucks as they were difficult to easily run up or undo when got the lathe .


A few hours work it would turn a brand new out the box rifle in to some that fair flowed when loading and squeezing the trigger , instead of the factory finish that felt like you were trying to use it to grind up bricks.

Obviously if you do use it and it's a success you'll need to use something like several cleanings using meths to kill the oils and flush off the grinding particles in the Brasso , wiping it off each time with a soft lint free cloth before finally giving everything a spray of 3 in 1 graphite oil or WD 40 oil .
I get eight or so old machine washed with out fabric conditioner kitchen dish cloths and bathroom face cloths once a month for this ..
The new ones come from Aldi or Lidl @ around £ 1 for a two pack and are microfibre cloths which are far superior to cotton ones in most cases .
They attract swarf as well ....

 

[Pete.]

Gotcha Pete , thanks .

Can you give me the UK brand names for your " way oil " & where you get it from please ?
Any info such as the SAE number would also be helpful.

I made new carriage way wipers and put small bits in the cup oilers on the cross shat to slow down the rate of oil run though out of Dr Scholl medical felt corn plasters .

Dave

I can't Dave, I'm still working my way through a 2L bottle I got off Graffian in 2009. Might have been Vactra I dunno but I'll have to get some more quite soon.

 

[DAPPH]

Thanks

 

[Kram]

I've been using up a bottle of motul 7100 bike oil, but I did plan to buy slide oil.. not sure which grade to get. ISO68 seems thinner than engine oil? but what everyone uses. Would thicker ISO220 be better on lathe slides?

 

[penfold]

Way oil from chronos; about half way down the page here.

Or on ebay if you want more choice/different weight of oil.

68 is a good general purpose oil, 220 is really for vertical slideways as they are more difficult to keep oil on.

 

[DanielW]

Oh, and the garage gnome has walked off with my shims, so I had to improvise to raise the tool enough:

Its quicker to get some different thickness plate,tin,aluminium,brass and raise the height of the tool by putting shims under the toolpost and lock it down.