My "new" American Tool Works Lathe

MrFixIt said:
Here's some informational pics for anyone else trying to figure out an old ATW lathe:
Click to expand...

Great pictures, Thanks! :encourage:
I am sure those will help more than just ATW owners, they look very familiar from other lathes.

You certainly are earning your user name.

-brino
 
Thanks Brino!
The irony is when I bought this lathe to "work on" I thought that meant to make chips, not to actually repair!
But you know what, it really has been a good learning experience; I now have some knowledge of what all the parts of a lathe are and what they do.
I'll really earn that user name if/when I get the QC box repaired and reassembled. ;)
 
Looks like my issue with that bearing cap isn't shim related; more like someone made a mistake on the babbit pour and didn't catch it. The sides of the babbit touch the spindle shaft before the rest of the bearing does. So much so I can put a dab of red grease on the underside of the center and place the cap on the shaft and work it around and the red grease doesn't transfer to the shaft at all. And looking at the wear it only has wear on those two sides.
Lower part of the babbit fits and looks fine though. Guess I'll have to take a little material off the sides of the babbit on that cap.
 
Google Bearing scraper Thats exactly what you need. I made one from a large triangular file, cut off 3 1/2 in long from the tang, grind the three flats to a point, with a radius, convex end to end, hollow ground on the face. mount it in a file handle, you've got a serviceable bearing scraper.
 
Thanks Tom, I checked into that and you're right, that's what I need to do. I'll get on it.
 
T Bredehoft said:
Google Bearing scraper Thats exactly what you need. I made one from a large triangular file, cut off 3 1/2 in long from the tang, grind the three flats to a point, with a radius, convex end to end, hollow ground on the face. mount it in a file handle, you've got a serviceable bearing scraper.
Click to expand...
. If you want to learn, grab a handful of Quality worn out saw
files , medium size is best. Put on your goggles, fire up your bench grinder, square up the surface of the wheel, and see if you can grind a narrow straight shiny line down
the center of the flat. Congrats if you succeeded. You now know the angle. If not, try again . If Cofusion overcomes you , you get several more tries before picking a
new blank from your pile. When you can do it reliably, go on , lightly and smoothly
end to end, do another flat (do not have a couple beers to celebrate) , and when you
have done three faces, have a beer while touching it up on a fine stone. Commiserations and the same advice available from...... BLJHB.
 
Not much new to report on this. I bought a bearing scraper and some prussian blue off of ebay and watched some videos on bearing scraping. But then I bought a Bridgeport J-Head and my garage was such a mess I couldn't even get to the lathe!
Now I got the garage in decent order it's been too wet and cold to work out there so not much has happened since. (Other than trying to power the J-Head, but I'll save that for the Bridgeport forum later.)
 
That's quite the battle your waging, but as they say, the tougher the fight the sweeter the victory. Really enjoying your journey. Thanks for sharing. Mike
 
Been a while since I've had progress to report, but I've finally made some pretty good progress. A couple of months ago I bought a Shars BXA QCTP for the lathe, installed it, but hadn't tried it since I still had the bearing issue to address.
Yesterday I finally had time to tackle the bearing so I went at it with the Prussian blue and the bearing scraper. I had to take a LOT of babbitt off the sides before that cap would sit down.
But I was successful, before the work I could stick a bar into the chuck/spindle and with an indicator on the chuck lift the bar and move the chuck/spindle 20 thousands! Now I'm down to just two shims on each side and a half-thousandth of play; I can live with that.
I chucked up some scrap steel and make a couple of sample cuts and it is much, much better! The cuts are cleaner and I got none of the chatter and popping from the compound that I got before all this work. (I did previously disassemble the compound and cross-slide and cleaned and tightened the gibbs. The gibb on the compound is kind of messed up because whomever did the brazing repair didn't remove the gib before repair; but it seems to be working fine with the attention I gave it so I can just address it later if it becomes a problem again.)
Still plenty to do, but at least the 108 year old lathe is usable again!
Thanks for reading!
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top