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Gingery Lathe and Accessories

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vtsteam:
Hello nel2lar!
I've seen the back gear book advertised, but haven't read it. My Gingery lathe improvement program stopped a few years ago when it was packed away while I built a house. I'd love to get it back in commission and try a lot of new ideas I have for it. I hope that will happen this summer. Meanwhile I am able to access my Sears/Atlas lathe in a storage shed (well, access barely), so that's what I'm using now while working on the 4 cycle engine to steam project. Thanks for the molding compliment -- can't wait to start pouring iron when warm weather arrives.

To continue the story:

Here is a photograph of the stock Gingery lathe counter shaft and pulley drive setup for the lathe arbor and lead screw. I usually try to build things the way the original designer intended, rather than modify them from the get-go. Modifications are fine once I have an understanding of the original design and operation to compare them with. I don't like modifying major aspects of a design before I try out the original. I trust the designer made choices for specific reasons that I may be unaware of. On the other hand, once I've built something and tried it out in its stock version, if I think I can improve it for my own needs, I'm more than willing to start up the foundry furnace!

The Gingery style lathe drive uses an over-center lock to tension or slacken the drive belts with the pull of a big accessible handle (barely visible at the top of the photo). The frame is fabricated out of angle iron, and as in all things Gingery, is designed to teach the builder some new construction skill. In this case riveting -- using sliced-off pieces of 1/8" and 1/4" steel rod.

You can also see my homemade cast aluminum and sintered bronze (Oilite) pillow blocks in use. I mounted them on wood shims (not a part of the Gingery instructions)  -- I like these in general because they allow me to adjust the shaft alignment by adjusting the compression of the attachment bolts. Wood will compress a little compared to metal.

The angle iron for the motor mount came from a discarded bed frame. The open frame motor as mentioned earlier was salvaged from an appliance -- a case would make it safer, btw -- Terry Aspin shows one in his casting books being molded. Project for the future.

The belt tensioner Dave Gingery designed allows easy speed changes, instant emergency stopping of the drive, and easy removal of the lathe arbor -- which became important to me later on when I started to use cast-on arbors and a milling arbor with my lathe and the milling attachment I designed.

The leadscrew reduction drive belts are circular sectioned vacuum cleaner belts -- available most anywhere, often on sale for $1. I have a lifetime supply. Actually the original shows no sign of wear.

Henning:

--- Quote from: nel2lar on February 15, 2013, 01:04:52 PM ---
I must say you have the touch, your casting is top shelf.


--- End quote ---

Understatement!

Now I'm waiting for more pic's!

vtsteam:
You guys must have missed the shrink cavities on the back of the faceplate in the photo above!!!
 :lol:

Well it's my accessory faceplate -- I have several, one is perfect. The one shown seemed good enough not to re-melt. But I have my good pours and not so good, just like everybody else. I had to re-cast my milling table twice.

But thank you all!

vtsteam:
Here's a view from the other end of the lathe. At this point I had made Gingery's steady rest, on the ways here, and a bell chuck (holding the shaft to be machined on the faceplate.) The tailstock had been finished.

Gingery accessories also seen in the lower part of the photo on the table, right to left, two homemade boring bars, lathe dog made from bolts and keystock,  pair of cast smaller angle plates bolted together to be used as a faceplate vice -- similar in action to a milling vice -- with a built in parallel attached to keep the work square and near the end of the vice for facing. A larger cast angle plate.

And finally (non Gingery) a plumbing floor flange and short pipe nipple which I drilled tapped and set-screwed to to a stub arbor, and faced (the flange) flat. This became my first face plate, onto which I mounted the larger raw cast faceplate to face it and bore that square. Then I swapped out the pipe flange for the real faceplate and had a lathe!

vtsteam:
Now that I had a lathe, I wanted to move on from making machine tools to something interesting. I planned to return and build Gingery's horizontal mill and maybe the shaper, too, but now I wanted to do something different.

What had caught my eye was a book by Cairns about Tesla disk turbines, and in it was a small turbine Cairns had built. Well I'd also been reading another old reprint of a magazine from the twenties that showed Delaval turbines of roughly the same size, and these also appealed to me. They had an old fashioned look I liked. Then I started reading Kurt Schreckling's book on the earliest model aircraft turbines he built, and finally decided I wanted to combine some features of all three. Cairns and the DeLaval' turbines had dual bearings -- in the case front and back. While Schreckling's had a central bearing tube. I thought about trying the Tesla turbine as either a steam turbine or a compressor, and this seemed to favor a cantilevered approach with a bearing tube out back. But for a case style I went with the old model DeLaval.

Well this thread is about the lathe, not the turbine, so to return to the subject, it became real clear to me that I needed a milling machine if I wanted to build it, because a Tesla turbine's disks have radial milled ports around the central shaft. I looked at the Gingery horizontal mill book and imagined spending months more building that. But I began to realize that the mill was essentially just a beefed up version of the lathe, with the addition of a mill head that could raise and lower. I'd also seen milling attachments for a lathe that raised a slide up and down. So I decided to combine features from some of this stuff, plus a rotary table so I could mill the Tesla disk slots.

First step I decided was to make a boring table for my lathe, and then mount a vertical slide on that. The vertical slide could take the rotary table. Well really the first step was to turn up a milling arbor that I could substitute for the lathe arbor, to hold end mills. If you look at the photo last post, that rod blank was being set up to become the new milling sindle.

Here I'm starting to make it:

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