Stripping

Stripping, stripping and more stripping. I spent quite a lot of time stripping grease, and paint off of every single component and part on this lathe. I'd have to say that alone took up the majority of time on this project. I used Citrustrip and the process generally was to slather on a coat of stripper, strip the majority off with a putty knife, then apply more stripper, strip with wire brushes and steel wool then switch to paint thinner to get off all the residue. Some sheet metal pieces where then sanded, while rough castings had an angle grinder with wire wheel applied to them. All in all a dirty messy process that I'm glad was over.

Here are some pieces in various states of cleanup.

Apron

The first assembly that I tackled was the apron. It was a good start to the project since it was quite complex and would be a test on things to come. After stripping it down and repainting all the parts it was ready to go back together.

One thing I noticed was the odd shaped gib for the half nuts. Apparently the original was missing and someone fabbed up this replacement. I wasn't all that bothered by it since it seemed to work fine. However subsequently I've noticed the half nuts are a bit sticky to engage. I may have to look into replacing this as well however its low on the priority list.

I probably re-assembled and dis-assembled the apron 5 times or so. I wish I would have taken better documentation pictures ant notes when I was taking things apart because nothing went together without headaches. There is a definite sequence of assembly that had to happen for everything to fit together on the apron.

Some of the levers and handles don't work as smoothly as I think they should so at some point I'm going to have to delve back into this thing to figure out what exactly the problems are but for now it works well enough to use.

Updates

I haven't had much time to update the blog in the recent months. However, much progress has been made on the lathe to date. Therefore I'm going to blow through a series of short posts to get everything up to speed and to generally document the process I've gone through.