Time for a little update.....
When dismantling stuff I like to take quite a few pictures so that I may refer back to them when trying to remember what goes where. Most stuff only fits one way or not at all, but occasionally those pictures can be a lifesaver. Not mine, but maybe the dogs......
I'm not going to show you all my wonderful snaps....thankfully...but here's one that shows the spindle nose and bearing housing cap. neither in particularly good cosmetic condition though they both function well enough.
I decided to make a new bearing cap from some free cutting steel (Stew
) Simple enough so I won't go into too much detail.
Once it was machined I used the old cap to act as a drilling jig and a socket to locate the centre.
And here's the result
You can see here the old one has had some abuse....before my time I might add.....
Fitted nice and snugly.....
I decided to clean up the nose as it was in a well battered state. I only took one picture........
But it did not lathe very well at all. The finish was awful. So I stuck an air die grinder in the tool holder and had my first ever go at spindle grinding?
My compressor simply could not keep up, so the speed was too low. Also I currently can't run my lathe in top speeds till I've sorted the garage electrics properly (volt drop on the long extension to the RC) so the lathe was too slow as well.....
Finish didn't look like a precision grind, but it was better than the lathed finish. No pic but here it is assembled back on the machine.
So here we are to date, cept I've been painting more bits tonight........got to keep busy eh....!!
