Wanted #3 Stark Lathe etc.

I agree with Tony.

This would be a excellent canadate for repair by surface grinding or even milling the top flat, then scrape flat again. The dovetails would have to be re-machined, scraped and fitted to the headstock and tailstock. Excellent weekend warrior job!
 
Well everyone has good comment's but there are two problems! 1. I don't know how to scrape a bed. 2. As I stated before, the bed must have been used as an anvil! Because of the large did in the center! Now I may be able to heat it and pound it back into shape with out warping it. And if I don't find something by the end of summer I may do that, however by buying a new setup I can swap the good with bad and go from there. Yes there scraping classes available but The cost of attending and, travel etc I can just buy a full set and more on. If I was going to repair two or more beds then yes a class would be great! But when the Naval Base in Charleston Closed with the shipyard the small shops and talent disappeared. The cheapest a local machine shop would make a face plate for me was $1800.00. CNC costs, Start up cost etc, I don't blame them because unless they are making hundreds then the costs will be high. One day I will find a retired machinist who will be able to impart some of their knowledge.

Cheers
Martin
 
Martin,

What ever you do, please don't beat on the bed anymore than what has already been done. Trying to beat it back into shape is just going to make a bigger mess on getting it to clean up.
I would suggest taking it to a local shop and see if they can set it up on a good mill, preferably a CNC mill, and machine the top flat using a nice face mill. While they are at it re-face the dovetails. This should not be more than a three to four hour job and not cost over $350 to do. The results should give you a fairly flat surface with a nice finish that for a watchmaker's lathe will last for ever! You will not remove all of those deep gouges, but most should clean up. Those gouges will not hamper the performance of the lathe, they just look bad. Now, re-fitting the headstock and tailstock may take some scraping to get it fitted properly, but doesn't have to be that precision fit as you would get on a factory Harlingen lathe.

If we were a little closer, I would offer to help you fix the lathe up.

Ken
 
I second Ken's thoughts. Please don't beat on it. Or put it in a press. If all you have to remove is the 0.015 to restore flatness, the head and tail stocks may not need to be touched.

Same as Ken, if you were closer, I'd do it for you.
 
Hi, Not a problem! I have set the bed aside and I will look at my options later. I actually grown quite fond of the little bugger and I would like to restore it back to original. If either one of you would like to take a crack at it later I will pay for shipping back an forth and pay for the job to be done right. But it would have to be after July, it appears that I will have to have some more work done on my body and I won't be able to get around for a few weeks. Saying that I can crate it with both the head and tail stock and ship it anywhere. Also I have about Six Hjorth lathes that I picked up before they were heading to the scrapper that I am going to make available to the members. Now these are really in good shape with collet closers, drilling tailstocks etc. And I have some collets and other items to got with them. Surprising that there are attachments out there if you are patient, some south bend and rivett use the same collets, chucks etc. Cheers Martin
 
That Hjorth name was a new one to me, so I had to look at the http://www.lathes.co.uk/hjorth/ page and wow, that's quite a little machine! I've been working on a design for building a lathe, but seeing what some of these little machines were supposed to be able to do, I am beginning to get depressed that I had no such high aspirations for my own design.

When you get ready to part with those, definitely keep me in mind.

And if you wanted to ship that warped little bed around, that would work too. I'd do some work on it.
 
Ken,

When I visited my brother last month up in Boston he took the bed over to a Machine shop in Fall River, to an old Navy Machinist. It was the Craziest thing that I have seen. He grabs the lathe bed with one hand lifts it straight up and sights it like a rifle. He then put a super flat gage to look for daylight, then marked it and put it in his forge oven brought out after a little bit red hot and clamped titanium flat bar to the top while it was still red and then put it in a Hydralic press and let it cool. Bang the 64th drop is gone and I ran a gauge completely down the length of the bed and it is great. He filled in the cuts (still visible) and told me to go play with it and if there is any problem let him know. I repaired an old Chelsa Navy Clock for him and he was happy! I was going to sell the whole set a week ago but the gentleman only wanted the collets and and the other attachments so I backed out and I put it up for a rainy day. I have to many projects at the moment along with honey do's that prevent me from going any further with it. My next project is to set up a bench to accomidate both my 5 1/2 S&C lathe and the S&C Horizontal Milling Machine. I found a southbend overhead counter shaft system but now I have to figure out a set up that will allow me to run both of the units off of one set up since the flat belt pulley on the milling machine is at angle of 90 degrees difference in relation to the the lathe I want the to run on the same bench.

Martin




4gsr said:
Martin,

What ever you do, please don't beat on the bed anymore than what has already been done. Trying to beat it back into shape is just going to make a bigger mess on getting it to clean up.
I would suggest taking it to a local shop and see if they can set it up on a good mill, preferably a CNC mill, and machine the top flat using a nice face mill. While they are at it re-face the dovetails. This should not be more than a three to four hour job and not cost over $350 to do. The results should give you a fairly flat surface with a nice finish that for a watchmaker's lathe will last for ever! You will not remove all of those deep gouges, but most should clean up. Those gouges will not hamper the performance of the lathe, they just look bad. Now, re-fitting the headstock and tailstock may take some scraping to get it fitted properly, but doesn't have to be that precision fit as you would get on a factory Harlingen lathe.

If we were a little closer, I would offer to help you fix the lathe up.

Ken
Click to expand...
 
Can anyone tell me about this Stark level cross slide?PXL_20201209_213549257.jpg

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