Nicely done John. I bet your Southbend is more rigid than my nasty little Chinese lump.Hi Danny. Sublime to ridiculous example of 'precision lathework' I thought you'd like to see.
I bought a massive Southbend lathe on ebay a few years ago because it was cheap and the seller offered to deliver. I didn't really know what I was buying except it had a long bed (think it is 5ft) which I thought would be handy for the sort of stuff I was playing with at the time. Good as his word he arrived with a trailer and a kit-form lathe on the agreed day and three of us dragged the bits into my workshop where we assembled it again. I was a bit taken aback when I realised just how enormous it was but also pretty pleased.
Well this old thing had been worked to death pretty much and bodged mercilessly to keep it going. The tool post is a homemade thing with half a dozen tool holders made from heavy angle iron but which actually do work pretty well. The motor is a single phase unit which is way underpowered for the machine and it needs a shove to get the chuck turning but it does the job just about. The flat belt has stretched (worn out) to the point that it slips badly on the slowest speed step and the motor lacks the power to drive at the third step onwards so really only one speed is useable. The plain bush bearing on the chuck shaft has a fair bit of slop in it but if I try to shim it out the motor won't turn!
If you add to all this that my only machining experience was at school with one period a week for six weeks 55 years ago you can understand that the deficiencies of the lathe pale into insignificance compared to the deficiencies of the user.
Anyway over the last few days I've been doing battle with some steel to make half-shafts for the cast ally mobike wheels I bought off ebay. I cut and ground some 1/4 flat to jagged oversized disks then drilled a suitable hole in the centres and welded these to the axles. I then mounted in the lathe and slowly turned the OD till they were a good fit in the cast centre of the wheels. I then took a skim off the faces to true them and marked and drilled the five holes for mounting bolts. Nobody could have been more surprised than me but they mounted and spin as true as I could have dared hope. Joan didn't seem to be quite as excited as I was but then she's a woman?
Sadly the shafts were too big for the plummer bearings and it took most of today to mount them and skim down to fit but even these seem pretty damned good considering the combined lack of precision of the lathe and me.
Anyway I enclose pics of the shafts first trial fitted to the wheels. Clearly our methodology and expectations are very different but I'm as pleased as you are at the results I've managed to achieve. These will be the rear wheels of my next delta which will be started in earnest once Joan runs out of good ideas for me to do for her.
All the best
John
Its an addictive pastime turning stuff from raw stock to usable part and I quite enjoy it.
I keep looking at larger, better lathes but I don't have the £2k+ in spare change down the back of the sofa.