And if anyone happens to have the specs on bearing tolerances for this machine that would be great. The gentleman who sold it took the spindle apart and when he put it back together there is about .004" radial and about .010 axial play. I got a little nauseous when I lifted the chuck while mounted and the spindle nose moved.
Look at parts 85 & 87 on page 8 of the IPB. The tapered roller bearing is a P5, the equivalent of an ABEC 5 bearing. A P5 bearing has about 0.0002" of radial run out and 0.0003" of axial run out. It is the lowest of the precision bearing class but still decent. The preload on this bearing set is adjustable; see page 23 of the manual to access the adjuster.
Emco says, "... turn the screwed ring until the spindle can be lightly revolved by hand." That is pretty vague and not very useful. The way the factory did this was used on every gear head lathe they made. This quote came from an Emco factory engineer who actually did this procedure:
"With the machine in neutral, disengaged from lead or hex screw (if applicable), and either the 3 or 4 jaw chuck installed, spin the chuck by gripping one of the opened jaws on top of the chuck and spin strongly. One revolution of the chuck is perfect. Less is too tight or bad bearings and more than 1.5 revolution is too loose."
So, how strong is "strongly"? As hard as you can spin it by hand. Use gloves to prevent the chuck jaw from taking off meat when you do this. Be sure to mark one jaw so you can clock the rotation. Note also that this adjustment is done
COLD, not with the lathe warmed up. The assembler made this adjustment before the lathe was fully assembled so this procedure is not done on a warmed up lathe.
The V13 was made to one of two DIN specs - the standard 8606 or the 8605 "tool room standard" and I don't know which one yours was made to. My Super 11 CD was made to the tool room standard and may differ from yours but mine has zero radial and axial play and I suspect you can adjust yours to very near that if your bearings are, in fact, class P5 or better. The only way to know is to remove the spindle and check it but before you do that, I would suggest you try adjusting it first. If you can get the spindle run out to a decent level, do the warm up test Emco suggests in the manual. Run it at high speed for 15 minutes and check the "warmth" of the bearings.
Emco typically used FAG bearings in their lathes and that is the brand I would use if this were me. I initially wrote about the proper way to grease these bearings but they are lubed by the oil inside the headstock - if you get the former post in an email, ignore that because I'm an idiot and was thinking about the Compac 8 that I worked on not too long ago.
You asked for the "specs of the bearings"; hope this helps.