Enco 13X40 Cracked Top Slide Way

mxr662

Andy Little
H-M Lifetime Diamond Member
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Jan 7, 2016
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There is a crack in back of the top slide and the way is bent. Should I try and braze this back together? The rest of the lathe is in pretty good condition.
Sharpie line to show crack.

IMG_20181104_052751.jpg
 
You could try and braze it ! However I suspect that it will warp and may even crack further. Even so you will still have a machining job to get it all straight afterwards.

In the old days it would be heat soaked in a furnace and then welded up whilst still in there, then afterwards allowed to cool slowly. Even so with luck and a fair wind you might get away with minimal distortion and machining.
 
Depending on how long the crack has existed, it may well be contaminated with crud which would prevent proper penetration of braze into the crack. I would agree that warping is likely.

Should you decide to try a braze repair, a common practice when repairing cracks in castings is to drill the end of the crack to prevent further growth of the crack.
 
I would secure the cracked piece in place with a few allen head capscrews down through the top. Contamination aside, braze does not penetrate cracks to begin with. Since there is so little strain on the guideway at the back end of the slide, little needs to be done to secure it, welding or brazing will do more damage than good.
 
The lathe came to me with the crack. I can see some marks where someone hammered on the top slide.
 
andy, bolting it as john suggests the top of the ways where the bolt head would be is not a bearing surface and the chips would not hang up there and cause gouging of the ways. one other thing is to put a hole at the end of the crack to stop it from continuing along, do not put the hole in the bearing surface of the ways bill
 
There is a crack in back of the top slide and the way is bent. Should I try and braze this back together? The rest of the lathe is in pretty good condition.
Sharpie line to show crack.

View attachment 279404
Is that a topslide or cross slide way? If it was a topslide I was going to advise you to look for a new one as they might be easy to find. In fact a lot of guys are replacing the topslide (compound for us in NA) with a solid block to make the machine more rigid. But a cross slide is a different matter. Welding cast iron is tough because with the high carbon content it is brittle and can't take any internal thermal gradient without cracking. So as the previous poster mentioned, you can't heat up one area and have the adjacent areas still cold - it will suck the heat from the weld and also the internal stresses will cause a crack for sure. So you have to heat the whole thing up in say a bbq, insulate it with blankets, weld it, then cool it down gradually. There are newer nickel based welding rods that can weld the material quite well. And you can braze it. And some guys weld it with directly with a torch, flux and filler metal from cast iron piston rings (Kent White for one - but he is not your average welder). Then they put the part in a wood stuff with some logs and let it burn down over 24 hrs or back in the bbq and let it all cool gradually. But for an enco Chinese lathe you have to wonder if it is worth it. Try to get a replacement part if you can.
 
Really this is a job for a professional, not a first timer.
 
What did you end up doing on the Enco Andy?
Just curious as always
 
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