Finally! I got back to the farm...

Big snowstorm recovery...

After last weeks big storm (over 30 inches at the farm!) it mostly melted away and I was able to get to the farm!  Yay!!

I spent almost all of my time in the shop working on getting the mill up and running and then the lathe "gearing" issues.  

The Mill

Before I connected up the power lines I had to put the mill on the floor!  It had been sitting on the black pipe that I use to put it in position.  I man-handled it into position and used a crow bar to ease it onto the floor off of the pipes.  I moved it away from the wall a little to give myself more room behind the machine.   

Yay!  Its on the floor now.  Hopefully never have to move this beast again!

Before I could do much more though, I decided to clean up a little...

The floor before...

The floor after!

I burned the scrap wood from the floor cleanup

Changing the milling machines oil

The mill has 3 different oil reservoirs that I wanted to change and freshen.  One "lube point" was for the spindle, which takes special oil and special grease (both of which I bought from enco).  Another lube location was the gear case for the power feed (only the "x" - left-right - feed has power feed on this mill).  The power feed gear box takes SAE 30 (non-detergent).  Finally, the main gear box also takes SAE 30.  I was easily able to change and lube the spindle because the spindle has a nice easy to access rain plug.  However, the power feed and main gearbox do NOT have a oil drain and require the used oil to be pumped out.  Pumping 30 weight oil in below freezing temps is NOT easy!  I did manage to get the power feed box pumped out - it wasn't too much but it still took over 30 mins!  I added oil to the fill line, BUT - I think I overfilled it because the oil was so thick Iit was har to gauge how much was really in there.

Spindle oil lever indicator.  Spindle uses oil for horizontal operation but manual says it must also be greased frequently when using it in vertical mode.

This is the oil level indicator for the main gear box - looks pretty dirty!  The manual indicates that the main box takes 2 quarts of oil!  I am going to wait until things warm up to pump this out - otherwise I could be pumping it out forever!

Access port to the main gear box - this is only way to get oil in or out!

The access cover to the powerfeed gear box. Again, this is the only way to get oil in or out of the gear box!

Wiring it all up

Well, I had been worrying that I was buying a lot of stuff for the mill but I had no idea if it worked!  I went to connect some power to it - I was originally planning to do the extension cord to power cord trick like I had for the lathe, but it would have required 2 cords and I didn't like that option.  So i went ahead and "hard wired" 2 boxes and one switch to connect up the lathe and the mill.  Once I connected the mills VFD (variable frequency drive) to the power it lit up its LED display but also started a cooling fan which is on whenever the VF has power, even if its not being used!  That's why I put the switch on the milling machines power line.  It needed a dual pole single throw switch.  Eventually, I will put all of the wiring inside of conduit to give it some protection.

VFD wired up.  I need to put conduit on this wire for sure - its too easy to trip on this wire!

Went back and rewired lathe too.   I will probably put this connect seen here inside a box in the near future.  Again, this wire needs to be in a conduit.

Box for splitting 220V line between lathe and mill.

Mill Motor inventory 

When looking at the VFD I noticed it was for 2.2KW, which seemed small to me.  For some reason I thought that the mill main drive motor was 5 hp - its not!  Below are the specification plates for the 3 motors on the mill.

Coolant pump motor Just 1 amp here.

Main drive motor - only 5.1 amps.  But look at that service factor! 2.2!!  so amperage could be up to 11.22 (I think).

This is the powerfeed motor - just 1.2 amp here/

So, all told, just 1.2+5.1+1=7.3 amp! (but COULD be as high as 13.42 amps because of main drive motor service factor).    I noticed that whoever programmed the VFD set the overamperage setting to 10 maps...  maybe I should change that setting to 13 amps?  The VFD indicator did show an "over current" error a couple times when I was playing with the machines switches.

Milling machine vise installed

I had to machine about 1/8" off of the heads of 2 bolts that I used to bolt the new vise to the table, but the lathe handled that real easy!

Vise under the milling head.

Bolted down

Facing off  about an eight of inch of the bolt heads so they would fit in mill table tee-slots

Using the mill to fix the lathes tee-bolt

First thing I milled was the tee-bolt for the quick change toolholder on the lathe.  It came too big to fit in the tee-slot of the compound on my lathe.  Easy enough to mill into shape...

Yeah - i used a piece of wood as a spacer.  I didn't have my set of parallels yet and besides, this tee-bolt is not needed to be that precise.  It just needs to fit!

Tada!  Beautiful!

And it works great!  I got rid of the spacer washer I ha been using on the top of the QC holder.  Much nicer fit that the original tee-nut too!

Broken end-mill bit...

BUT, I didn't learn from my many warnings for youtube machinists... ALWAYS put down a towel or something soft on the mill table when loosening the tool bit!!

Sigh.  After I put the mill bit in the collet I noticed it was not centered - so I loosened the collet to adjust and ... the bit fell out - bounced off the table and onto the concrete floor!  Upon examination I found that only one for the 4 flutes ha been chipped... or so I thought.  When I went to use it however, two more flutes broke and a chip came off of the 4th!  ARG!  I was still able to use the bit, but its not producing a nice cut on the side cuts.  I ordered more bits...

Lathe "gear" work

I brought up the new bushings for the 3 replacement gears for the lathe back-gears, machined them to size (they didn't need much machining!), and pushed them into the gears! Beautiful fit!  I did have to machine the inside of one of the bushings after insertion in the gear due to shrinkage of the ID, but it didn't need much.

I used my arbor press to press the bushings in

Excellent fit!  

Reassembly of the gear train...

Now to the hard part..  reassembly of the gear train!  As can be seen in the pictures below, there is not a lot of space to work!  All those gears on the right there are KEYED to the shaft - and the key runs the entire distance of those gears!

I devised a scheme that I hoped would work to get those gears on the shaft without having to remove the bushing on the right hand side.  The idea was to machine another shaft that I put the gears and key on and then run the actual shaft in from the left (it has to come in from the left - unless I also want to bore out the center bushing and replace that WHILE the shaft is in place - can't do it!).  The actual shaft, of course, would have to be driven into the gears AND the key!   This gave e  an excuse to use my lathe to make a dummy shaft and use my mill to make a flat for the key!  Fun! (it really was - lol)

Used my lathe to make a dummy shaft to help with gear train install.

Got to use many of my lathe tools!

And since I was turning a shaft, I got to use my live center! [BTW, I finally got a replacement nut for the tailstock handle so that's working nicely now]

I saw a neat idea on youtube about making my own 60 degree center for my 3-jaw chuck to hold so that I didn't need to remove the chuck just to turn between centers!  I milled an old bolt left over from previous owner.  Carbide tooling cuts even that hard stuff!

However, this "wonderful" dual-dummy shaft idea lead to my downfall.  I was using a wooden mallet to drive the actual shaft onto the key and gears, but the fit was very tight. I decided I would "help" the fit by milling off some of the key height and width as well as filing some of the shaft so that the gears fit easier (the shaft was quite worn and had some creases in it that obstructed the gears from sliding on.  I milled off so much of the key that it was able to fit inside of the center bushing/  This helped a lot because then I was able to have more room to fit the gears in place on the right hand side!  However, When I got all of the gears on and everything seemed to be good - I discovered that the key was not engaging the gears near the center of the shaft!  So I had to take it all apart again!  Oh, but here is where things get really messed up - all of the gears came off easily - EXCEPT the ones near the center!  The key got out of the key way (because it was so undersized) and WEDGED between the gears and the shaft.  WEDGED tight!  I tried using the mallet and even a hammer to remove them, but no go.  I decided to give up at that point and left the farm before I could break something expensive!

My plan at this point is to try to drill out the key stock that is stuck between the gear and shaft. Then, hopefully that will loosen things up enough that I will be able to use the mallet to rive off the gears.  Then I guess I will bite then bullet and bore out the bushing on the right side of the shaft and put the key in from that side (which I figure is how they assembled it to begin with).  Of course that means I will need to get another bushing an press that in!  UGH.  Might be another month of work here!

Happy New Year!

More lathe restoration work

I started going over the lathe trying to figure out all the levers and controls.  Found that the gear-select levers on the power feed (and threading gears) were sticking.  In fact, one of the gear-select levers was absolutely "frozen".  The gear "box" is actually open at the bottom so I was able to use my phone to take some pictures and videos to see what was going on.

Using phone to take picture "under" the gear box while its still in place.
On the lower right corner of this picture you can see some rust on a gear - that is where the stuck lever is supposed to engage.

Another "under the box shot" with phone.  Trying to get a better shot of the frozen lever area.  That area is just too congested to get a decent shot.  

At this point I realized that I would have to take the gear box off the lathe to get a better look.  After fiddling for most of a day to get the  gear box off I finally had some success.  The gear box is easiest to remove from the right (as you face the front of the lathe).  The issue is the lead screw..which is threaded the gear box (actually attached to it), the apron and of course the tail side of the lathe.   I discovered that the various head stock covers are actually fairly easy to take off.  So after a bunch of fiddling here is what I found:

Actually able to see into the gear box now that its off the lathe!
The lower left is where the stuck lever is.  See the rust on those gears?

This shows how I took off the gear box.  

Frozen lever on top.  Severely worn gear - third from the right.

The stuck lever and gear.

Another view of the stuck lever

Looking at where the stuck gear would have engaged, I see a gear with some broken teeth!  Look in front of where I am pointing in the picture.

After taking off the shaft that engages from the gearbox to the back-gears I am happy to see no more broken gears...at first..

The shaft that holds he gears that engage the back gears from the gearbox.  The big gear on the left goes to the back gears.

These are the gears that engage in the gear box.  Looks ok, right?

But on closer examination of this gear I realize that on the small smooth hub on the right of this ganged gear there seems to be the hint of gear teeth real close to.the crotch   - you can kind of see the missing teeth in this picture if you look closely.

So, evidently. this gear was broken at some point in the past, and instead of replacing it, they simply faced off the gear teeth!  So basically, what I found was that one gear had been milled smooth, one gear had broken teeth, and one gear was severely worn.   I purchased and downloaded the lathe manual from Logan (yes, they are still in business and still supply parts for this lathe!).  For the record, my lathe is a Logan T-6560H (14" swing with a 40" bed).  Then "H" on the end of the model number indicates that it has flame hardened ways.  Nice!  I believe the "T" in the front of the model number indicate that it supports a turret, although mine doesn't have a turret, I could purchase one should I choose to convert this into a turret lathe!  Nice!

Upon examination of the gearbox diagrams I determined that all three of damaged gears are EXACTLY the same part number!  Logan part number 1392.  Looking that part up on the logan website indicates it costs $220 - EACH!  that would be $660 to replace all three!  UGH

This shows the gear box with the lever shaft removed.

Closeup of where the lever shaft would be 

Closeup of the worn gear (third from the right).

After watching some youtube videos on this matter (tubalcain) I decided to check on eBay for these gears.  I was lucky and not only found the part - but I found 3 of them and they are only $38 each! So instead of costing $660 I bought the replacements for only $114!   The only problem with the replacements are that they don't include the inner bushing.  I will have to recover the bushings from the existing broken gears.

I continued with the disassembly and cleanup of the gearbox.   I used brake fluid cleaner to remove the old grease and dirt (and chips that got impacted between the gear teeth),

This picture shows the box completed emptied of gears.  I am showing the placement of  a bushing/spacer here.

Same spacer.

Showing the gear train.  Note the key.  Note that this is going to be a bugger to put together again I bet!

After cleaning the gear train with brake cleaner

More cleaned gears and shaft for the back gear connecting portion.

I did squirt some WD-40 on these parts since, once cleaned with brake cleaner, I was afraid they might rust!

Backhoe

Well, the backhoe wasn't starting for me, even after recharging the battery for days!  My next thought was just to replace the batteries (2 6 volt batteries in series) with 2 12 volt batteries in parallel.  I can pick up cheap 12 volt batteries at Walmart for total of about $220.   As I was looking over the battery box I realized that the 12 volt batteries would not physically fit, but more importantly I also realized that I was charging only 1 of the 6 volt batteries!  So I re-connected the charger, this time to the correct terminals!) and let it charge for several hours.  I had to charge at 35 A to see any effect.  That one battery hasn't been charge and is pretty fried I think.   In any case, after trying to start it again I got it to turn over and run for a few seconds!  It was fairly cold out (just a tad below freezing) so it took several attempts to get it to start and run - but it runs!  After letting it warm for a bit I moved it back into the garage.  I was careful to put the locking pins in and put the bucket down in a position that should keep it from drifting in the garage wall (like it did last time!).  I should point out that the "forward" and "reverse" pedals are identified in the backhoe user's manual!


The starting procedure is:

1. Put the machine into neutral using the big lever on the left of the steering wheel column.
2. Turn the ignition key to the right - one click
3. Push and hold the glow-plug heater button (silver button on the lower right of the front panel).  Hold it in for about 60-90 sec (if cold).  Make sure it pops back to the off position when released - it has a tendency to stick!
4. Now turn the ignition key all the way to the right and depress the hydraulic release pedal on the floor - back of your left foot as you sit in the drivers seat.
5. Open the throttle wide open
6. Hit the starter button to crank the engine.
7. It should start at this point.  Keep trying if it does not.
8. Once it starts, turn the throttle down to something reasonable,  Don't leave it wide open - it is hard on the engine!
9. Don't forget to take it out of neutral before you move it!  Also, be sure to remove the locking pins!

Back in its place in the garage.

Pumpkin processing and seed saving

I baked the last of the Musque de Provence pumpkins (they were starting to get bad spots) and pureed the meat.    I also saved the seeds.  I used 6 Cups of the puree to make pumpkin leather!  I used the nchfp recipe.

In the dehydrator.  I made 3 trays worth.

I package this one up and took it to the New Years family get together

I took one of the 3 batches over to mom's for the New Years family get together.


Since this was the last of the pumpkins I decided to save the seeds from these (also - they were FAR away from any other pumpkins so they should be true seeds.)   After I washed the seeds well, I placed them in the dehydrator at 90F overnight.  The goal was to removed as much surface moisture as possible so they wouldn't mold during storage, but not to remove so much that the seeds would be denatured.

Bear meat!

I took some goodies over to my neighbor for the holidays and he gave me several pounds of bear meat!  This was some of the 300lb bear he shot earlier this season.  I haven't tried cooking it yet, but I am excited to try it!  He also gave me some "chipped venison", and some venison hot dogs and summer sausage!